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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 



HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS 



By WALTER PATER, M.A. 

FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD 




•' Wisdom hath builded herselt a house ; she hath mingled 
l^er wine ; she hath also prepared for herself a table. " 



A. L. BURT COMPANY, J^ J^ J^ J^ jf^ 
y ^ c^ J' PUBLISHERS. NEW YORK 



I9fil 






61FT 

ESTATE OF 
V'CTOft s. CUBIC 



CONTENTS. 



PART THE FIRST. 

CHAPTER «»ACTI 

I. «« The Religion of Numa " .., 1 

II. White-Nights 10 

III. Dilexi Decorem Domus Tuae 23 

IV. OMare, O Littus, Verum Secretumque Movaeiov 36 
V. The Golden Book 48 

VI. Euphuism 82 

VII. Pagan Death 100 

PART THE SECOND. 

VIII. Animula, Vagula, Blandula ! Ill 

IX. New Cyrenaicism 130 

X. Mirum Est Ut Animus Agitatione Motuque 

Corporis Excitetur 143 

XI. The Most Religious City in the World 155 

XII. The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King ,. 170 

XIII. The " Mistress and Mother'* of Palaces 192 

XIV. Manly Amusement ...,,,,,,.,,,,,............. 



viii CONTENTS. 

PART THE THIRD 

CHAPTER TA9t 

XV. Stoicism at Court 223 

XVI. Second Thoughts 233 

XVII. Many Prophets and Kings have Desired to See 

the Things which Ye See 251 

XVIII. *♦ The Ceremony of the Dart " 263 

XIX. Paratum Cor Meum, Deus 1 377 



PART THE FOURTH, 

XX. Guests 293 

XXI. The Church in Cecilia's House 308 

XXII. The Minor ' ' Peace of the Church " 323 

XXIII. Sapientia ^dificavit Sibi Domum 341 • 

XXIV. A Conversation Not Imaginary 353 

XXV. Sunt Lacrimse Rerum 382 

XXVI. Ah ! Voila les Ames qu'il Falloit a la Mienne !. . 394 

XXVII. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius 404 

XXVIII. Anima Naturaliter Christiana 414 



.JT 



PART THE FIRST 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 



CHAPTEK I. 



" THE RELIGION OF NUMA." 



As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion 
lingered latest in the country, and died out at last 
as but paganism— the religion of the villagers— be- 
fore the advance of the Christian Church ; so, in an 
earlier century, it was in phices remote from town- 
life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself 
had survived the longest. While, in Kome, new 
religions had arisen with bewildering complexity 
around the dying old one, the earlier and simpler 
patriarchal rehgion, "the religion of Numa," as 
people loved to fancy, lingered on with little change 
amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and senti- 
ment of which so much of it had grown. Glimpses 
of such a survival we may catch below the merely 
artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry ; inTibuU 
lus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic 
details of old Roman religious usage. 

At mi hi oontingat patrios celebrare Penates, 
Reddereque antique menstrua thura Lari : 



2 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

—he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something 
liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of 
words, is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of 
the ritual of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from 
a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, 
the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was 
still indeed an altar ; and the worthiest sacrifice to the 
gods the perfect physical sanity of the young men 
and women, which the scrupulous ways of that re- 
ligion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A re- 
Jigion of usages and sentiments rather than of facts 
and beliefs, and attached to very definite things and 
places — the oak of immemorial age, the rock on 
the heath fashioned by Aveather as if by some dim 
human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into 
which one exclaimed involuntarilv (in consecrated 
phrase) Deity is in this Place! — Numen Inest ! — 
it was in natural harmony with the temper of a 
quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life ; like 
that simpler faith between man and man, which 
TibuUus expressly connects with the period when, 
with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods 
had been still pressed for room in their homely little 
nhrines. 

And about the time when the dying Antoninus 
Pius ordered his golden image of Fortune to be 
carried into the chamber of his successor (now about 
to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that 
the woi-kl would at last find itself happy, could it 
but detach some reluctant philosophic student from 
the more desirable life of celestial contemplation, and 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 3 

compel him to rule it) thers was a boy living in an 
old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for him- 
self, recruited that body of antique traditions by a 
spontaneous force of religious veneration such as had 
originally called them into being. It was more than 
a century and a half since Tibullus had written ; but 
the restoration of religious usages, and their reten- 
tion where they still survived, had meantime become 
fashionable through the influence of imperial ex- 
ample ; and what had been in the main a matter of 
famil}^ pride with his father, was sustained by a native 
instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense 
of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased 
or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every 
circumstance of dailv life — that conscience, of which 
the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual rec- 
ognition, had become in him a powerful current of 
feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly 
puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted 
and valued so highly in a northern peasantry, had 
its counterpart in the feeling of the lioman lad, as 
he passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the 
lightning had struck dead an aged laborer in the 
field : an upright stone, still with moldering gar- 
lands about it, marked the place. He brought to 
that system of symbolic usages, and they in turn 
developed in him further, a great seriousness, an 
impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life and 
its events, and the circumstances of family fellow- 
ship — of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth 
from labor on which they live, really understood by 



4 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

him as gifts — a sense of religious responsibility in the 
reception of them. It was a religion for the most 
part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a vear-long 
burden of forms ; yet rarely (on clear summer morn- 
ings, for instance) the thought of those heavenly 
powers afforded a welcome channel for the almost 
stifling sense of health and delight in him, and re- 
lieved it as gratitude to the gods. 

It was the day of the " little " or private Arribar- 
valia, celebrated by a single family for the welfare 
of all belonging to it, as the great college of the 
Arval Brothers at Rome ofliciated in the interest of 
the whole state. At the appointed time all work 
ceases; the instruments of labor lie untouched, hung 
with wreaths of flowers ; while masters and servants 
together go in solemn procession along the dry paths 
of vinevard and cornfield, conductino" the victims 
whose blood is presently to be shed for the purifica- 
tion from all natural or supernatural taint of the 
lands they have '' gone about." The old Latin words 
of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved 
along, though their precise meaning had long since 
become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient 
illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in the 
hall, together with the family records. Early on 
that day the girls of the farm had been busy in the 
great portico, filling large baskets with flowers 
plucked off short from branches of apple and cherry, 
then in spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint 
images of the gods — Ceres and Bacchus and the yet 
more mysterious Dea Dia — as they passed through 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 5 

the fields, carried in their little houses, on th^ 
shoulders of white-clad youths, who were understood 
to proceed to that oflice in perfect temperance, as 
pure in soul and body as the air they breathed in the 
firm weather of that earlv summer-time. The clean 
lustral water and the full incense-box were carried 
after them. The altars were gay with garlands of 
wool and the more sumptuous sort of flowers, and the 
green herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, 
fresh-gathered this morning from a particular plot 
in the old garden, set apart for the purpose. Just 
then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as 
flowers, and the fresh scent of the bean-fields mingled 
pleasantly with the cloud of incense. But for the 
monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests, 
clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and 
bearing ears of green corn upon their heads secured 
by flowing bands of white, the procession moved in 
absolute stillness, all persons, even the children ab- 
staining from speech after the utterance of the pon- 
tifical formula, Favete Unguis I — Silence ! Propi- 
tious Silence ! — lest any words save those proper to 
the occasion should hinder the religious efficac}^ of 
the rite. 

With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his 
house, took a leading part in the ceremonies of tiie 
day, there was a devout effort to complete this im- 
pressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of 
mind, esteemed so important by religious Romans in 
the performance of these sacred functions. To him 
the sustained stillness without seemed really but to 



6 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

be waiting upon that interior, mental condition ot 
preparation or expectancy, for which he was just 
then intently striving. The persons about him, cer 
tainly, had never been challenged by those pra3''ers 
and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine 
nature : they conceived them rather to be the ap- 
pointed means of setting such troublesome move- 
ments at rest. By them, " the religion of ISTuma," so 
staid, ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous 
conservatism, though of direct service as lending 
sanction to a sort of high scrupulosity, especially in 
the main points of domestic conduct, was mainly 
prized as being, through its hereditary character, 
something like a personal distinction — as contribut- 
ing, among the other accessories of an ancient house, 
to the production of that aristocratic atmosphere 
which separated them from newly-made people. But 
in the young Marius, the very absence of all definite 
history and dogmatic interpretation from those vener- 
able usages, had already awakened much speculative 
activity ; and to-day, starting from the actual details 
of the divine service, some very lively surmises, 
though hardly definite enough to be thoughts, were 
moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the 
stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and 
were like the passing of some mysterious influence 
over all the elements of his nature and experience, 
One thing only distracted him — a certain pity at the 
bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the 
sacrificial victims and their looks of terror, risingf 
almost to diso^ust at the central act of the sacrifice 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. f 

itself ; a piece of everyday butcher's work, such as 
we decorously hide out of si<j^ht ; though some then 
present certainly displayed an undisguised curiosity 
in the details of the spectacle, tlius permitted them 
on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the 
great procession on the frieze of the Parthenon of 
Athens, have delineated the placid heads of the 
victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for 
animals, in forcible contrast with any indifference as 
to their sufferings. It was this contrast that dis- 
tracted Marius now in the blessing of his fields, and 
qualified his devout absorption upon the scrupulous 
fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the 
procession approached the altars. 

The names of that great populace of " little gods," 
dear to the Roman home, which the pontiffs had 
placed on the sacred register of the IndigitaTyienta^ to 
be invoked, because they can help, on special occa- 
sions, were not forgotten in the long litany — Vatican, 
who causes the infant to utter his first cry ; Fabulinus, 
who prompts his first word ; Cuba, who keeps him 
quiet in his cot ; Domiduca, especially, for whom 
Marius had through life a particular memory and 
devotion — the goddess who watches over one's safe 
coming home. The urns of the dead in the family 
chapel received their due service. They also were 
now become something divine, a goodly company of 
friendly and protecting spirits, encamped about the 
place of their former abode — above all others, the 
father, dead ten years before ; of whom, remembering 
l)ut a tall, grave figure above him in early childhood, 



8 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Marius habitually thought as a genius a little cold 
and severe. 

Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi, 
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera — 

Perhaps ! — but certainly needs his altar here below^ 
and flowers to-day upon his urn. But the dead genii 
were satisfied with little — a few violets, a cake dipped 
.'n wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from the 
time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, 
had Marius taken them their portion of the family 
meal, at the second course, amidst the silence of the 
company. They loved those Avho brought them 
their sustenance ; but, deprived of these services, 
would be heard wandering through the house, crying 
sorrowfully in the stillness of the night. 

And those simple gifts, like other objects equally 
trivial — bread, oil, wine, milk — had regained for him, 
by their use in such religious service, that poetic, and 
as it were moral significance, which surely belongs to 
all the means of our daily life, could we but break 
through the veil of our familiarity with things by no 
means vulo^ar in themselves. A hvmn followed, while 
the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. The fire 
rose up readily from the altars, with a clean, bright 
flame — a favorable omen, making it a duty to render 
the mirth of the evening complete. Old wine was 
poured out freely for the servants at supper in the 
great kitchen, where they had worked in the imper- 
fect light through the long evenings of winter. The 
young ^iarius himself took but a verv !>ober part in 



MARIUS THE EPirUREAN". 9 

the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste 
of wliat liacl been reall}^ beautiful in the ritual he 
had accomplished, took him early away, that he 
might the better recall in reverie all the circumstances 
of the celebration of the day. As he sank into 
a sleep, pleasant with all the influences of long hours 
in the open air, he seemed still to be moving in pro- 
cession through the fields, with a sort of pleasurable 
awe. That feeling was still upon him as he awoke 
amid the beating of violent rain upon the shutters, 
in the first storm of the season. The thunder which 
startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude 
of his chamber almost painfully complete, as if the 
nearness of the angry clouds shut him up in a close 
place alone in the world. Then he thought of the 
sort of protection which that day's ceremonies 
assured. To procure an agreement with the gods — 
Pacem deorum exfoscere ! — that was the meaning of 
what they had all day been bus}^ upon. In a faith, 
;sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain have those 
Powers at least not against him. Plis own nearer 
household gods were all around his bed : the spell of 
his religion as a part of the very essence of home, 
its intimacy, its dignity and security, was forcible 
at that moment ; only, it seemed to involve certair 
heavy demands upon him. 



CHAPTEE II. 

WHITE-NIGHTS. 

To an instinctive seriousness the material abode in 
which the childhood of Marius was passed had large- 
ly added. ^N^othing, you felt, as you first caught 
sight of that coy, retired place — surely nothing could 
happen there, without its full accompaniment of 
thought or reverie. White-nights I — so you might 
interpret its old Latin name. " The red rose came 
first," says a quaint German mystic, speakingyof " the 
mystery of so-called white things," as being " ever an 
after-thought — the doubles, or seconds, of real things, 
and themselves but half real or material — the white 
queen — the white witch — the white mass, which, as 
the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned 
to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by 
young candidates for the priesthood with an uncon- 
secrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white 
nights, I suppose, after something like the same 
analogy, should be nights not passed in quite blank 
forgetfulness, but those which we pass in continuous 
dreaming, only half- veiled by sleep. Certainly the 
place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in 
this, that you might very well conceive, in the face 
of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come 

to much there. 
10 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. H 

The young Marius represented an ancient family 
whose estate had come down to him much 
curtailed through the extravagance of a certain 
Marcellus two generations before, a favorite in hig 
day of the fashionable world at Home, where he had 
at least spent his substance with a cori-ectness ot 
taste, wbich Marius might seem to have inherited 
from him ; as he was believed also to resemble him 
in a singularly pleasant smile, consistent, however, 
in the younger face, with some degree of somber 
expression when the mind within was but slightly 
moved. 

As the means of life decreased the farm had crept 
nearer and nearer to the dwelling-house, about which 
there was therefore a trace of workday negligence 
or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm 
for some, for the young master himself among them. 
The more observant passer-by would note, curious 
as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty care 
amid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps^ 
from a reluctance to disturb old associations. It 
was significant of the national character, that a sort 
of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, was much 
affected by some of the most cultivated Eomans. 
But it was something more than an elegant diver- 
sion, something more of a serious business, with the 
household of Marius : and his actual interest in the 
cultivation of the earth and the care of flocks had 
brought him, at least, intimately near to those 
elementarv conditions of life, a reverence for which, 
the great Roman poet as he has shown by his own 



12 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

half-mystic pre-occupation with them, held to be the 
ground of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive 
morals. But then, farm-life in Italy, including the 
culture of the vine and the olive, has a peculiar grace 
of its own, and might well contribute to the pro- 
duction of an ideal dignity of character, like that of 
nature itself in this gifted region. Yulgarity seemed 
impossible. The place, though impoverished, was 
still deservedly dear, full of venerable memories, 
and with a living sweetness of its own for to-day. 

It had been then a part of the struggling family 
pride of the lad's father to hold by those ceremonial 
traditions, to which the example of the head of the 
state, old Antoninus Pius — an example to be still 
further enforced by his successor — had given a fresh 
though perhaps somewhat artificial popularity. It 
was consistent with many another homely and old- 
fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm 
of exclusiveness and immemorial authoritv, which 
membership in a local priestly college, hereditary in 
his house, conferred upon him. To set a real value 
on those things was but one element in that pious 
concern for his home and all that belonged to it, 
which, as Marius afterwards discovered, had been a 
strong motive with his father. The ancient hymn 
• — Jana Novella ! — was still sung by his people, as 
the new moon grew bright in the west, and even 
their wild custom of leaping through heaps of blaz- 
ing straw on a certain night in summer was not dis« 
couraged. Even the privilege of augury, according 
to one tradition, had at one time belonged to his 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 13 

race : and if you can imagine how, once in a way, 
an impressible boy might have an inkling^ an inward 
mystic intimation, of the meaning and consequences 
of all that, what was implied in it becoming explicit 
for him, you conceive aright the mind of Marius, in 
whose house the auspices were still carefully con- 
sulted before every undertaking of moment. 

The devotion of the father, then, had handed on 
loyally — and that is all many not unimportant per- 
sons ever find to do — a certain tradition of life, 
which came to mean much for the young Marius. 
It was with a feeling almost exclusively of awe that 
he thought of his dead father ; though at times in- 
deed, with a not unpleasant sense of libert}^, as he 
could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actu- 
al absence of so weio^htv and continual a restraint, 
upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and 
Roman law gave to the parent over his son. On the 
part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining 
the husband's memory, there was a sustained fresh- 
ness of regret, together with the recognition, as 
Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice, to be 
credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid 
and shadowy enough but for the poignancy of that 
regret, was like one long service to the departed 
soul ; its many annual observances centering about 
the funeral urn — a tiny, delicately carved marble 
house, still white and fresh — in the family-chapel, 
wreathed always with the richest flowers from the 
gaj'den : the dead, in those country places, being 
allo^ved a somewhat closer neighborhood to the old 



14 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

homes they were supposed still to protect, than is 
usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself — a close- 
ness which, so diverse are the ways of human senti- 
ment, the living welcomed, and in which the more 
wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge 
themselves. All thisMarius followed with a devout 
interest, sincerely touched and awed bv his mother's 
sorrow. After the deification of the emperors, we 
are told, it was considered impious so much as to 
use any coarse expression in the presence of their 
imao-es. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of 
sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collect- 
edness. The severe and archaic religion of the 
villa, as he conceiv^ed it, begot in him a sort of 
devout circumspection lest he should fall short at 
any point of the demand upon him of anything in 
which deity was concerned : he must satisfy, with 
a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious 
not to be wanting to, the claims of others, in their 
jo3^s and calamities — the happiness which deity 
sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt. 
And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility 
towards the w^orld of men and things, towards a 
claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side, 
came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. 
It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicurean 
speculations, which in after years much engrossed 
him, when he had learned to think of all religions 
as indifferent — serious, amid many fopperies, 
and through many languid days ; and made him 
anticipate all his life long, as a thin^ towards \yhioh 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 15 

he must carefully train himself, some great occasion 
of self-devotion, like that which really came, which 
should consecrate his life, and it might be the mem- 
ory of it among others ; as the early Christian 
looked forward to martyrdom at the end of his 
course, as a seal of worth upon it. 

The traveler, descending from the slopes of Luna, 
even as he got his first view of the Port-qf- Venus, 
would pause by the way, to read the face, as it were, 
of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying well away from 
the white road, at the point where it began to decline 
somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The 
building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by 
age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but 
the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous 
villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea- wind were 
in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its in- 
accessible ledges and angles. Here and there the 
marble plates had slipped from their places, where 
the delicate weeds had forced their way. The grace- 
ful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm, gave 
place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, 
and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order 
reigned within. The old Koman architects seem to 
have well understood the decorative value of the 
floor — the real economy there was, in the production 
of rich interior effect, of a somewhat lavish expendi- 
ture upon the surface they trod on. The pavement 
of the hall had lost something of its evenness ; but, 
though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared 
for like a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is 



16 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

apt to do, its best in old age. Most noticeable among 
the ancestral masks, each in its little cedar chest be 
low the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant 
Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow 
waxen features to Marius, just then so full of anima- 
tion and country color. A chamber, curved ingeni- 
ously into oval form, which he had added to the 
mansion, still contained his collection of works of art ; 
above all, the head of Medusa, for which the villa was 
famous. The spoilers of one of the old Greek towns 
on the coast had flung away, or lost the thing, as it 
seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, 
from the sands of which it had been drawn up in a 
fisherman's net, with the fine golden lamince still 
clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Mar- 
cellus also who had contrived the prospect-tower of 
two stories, with the white pigeon-house above it, so 
characteristic of the place. The little glazed windows 
in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty 
landscape — the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly 
twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath ; the dis- 
tant harbor with its freight of white marble going 
to sea ; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its 
dark headland, ^mid the long-drawn curves of white 
breakers. Even on summer nights the air there had 
always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the 
new-mown hay along all the passages of the house. 

Something pensive, spellbound, and as but half 
real, something cloistral or monastic, as we should 
say, united to that exquisite order, made the whole 
place seem to Marius, as it were — sacellum — the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 17 

peculiar sanctuary of his mother, who, still in real 
widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder, 
with that secondary sort of life which we can o^ive to 
the dead, in our intensely realized memory of them 
— the " subjective immortality," as some now call it, 
for which many a Iloman epitaph cries out plaintively 
to widow or sister or daughter, still alive in the land 
of the livinof. Certainly, if any such considerations 
regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he 
enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place 
still left, in thought at least, beside the living, the 
desire for which is actually, in various forms, so great 
a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, 
even thus early, came to think of women's tears, of 
women's hands to lay one to rest, in death as in 
the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want. 
The soft lines of the w^hite hands and face, set among 
the many folds of the veil and stole of the Roman 
widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music 
sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical 
expression of maternity. Helping her with her white 
and purple wools, and caring for her musical instru- 
ments, he won, as if from the handling of such 
things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying 
the freshness of his country -grown habits — the sense 
of a certain delicate blandness, which he relished, 
above all, on returning to the " chapel " of his mother, 
after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or 
stormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, 
hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures 

of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm 
2 



18 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in 
flower, though the hail is beating hard without. One 
important principle, of fruit afterwards in his Eoman 
life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him ; 
in the winters especially, when the sufferings of the 
animal world come so palpably before even the least 
observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all crea- 
tures, for the almost human sicknesses and troubles 
of the flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which 
had in it something of religious veneration for life, as 
such — for that mvsterious essence which man is 
powerless to create in even the feeblest degree. One 
by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke 
down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry 
wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told 
him once, looking at him gravely — a bird which he 
must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place 
— his own soul was like that ! Would it reach the 
hands of his good genius on the opposite side, un- 
ruffled and unsoiled ? And as his mother became to 
him the very type of maternity in things — its un- 
failing pity and protectiveness — and maternity itself 
the central type of all love ; so, that beautiful dwell- 
ing-place gave singular reality and concreteness to a 
peculiar ideal of home, which through all the rest of 
his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, 
to be ever seeking to regain. 

And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in 
him, enhanced still further that sentiment of home, 
as a place of tried security. His religion, that old 
Italian religion, in contrast with the really light- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. I9 

hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent 
of gloom, its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively 
confined to the walls of Etrurian tombs. The func- 
tion of the conscience, not always as the prompter of 
a gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his 
accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a 
large place in it ; and the sense of some unexplored 
evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made him oddly 
suspicious of particular places and persons. Though 
his liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce 
day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow 
road, he had seen the snakes breeding ; and had ever 
afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associa- 
tions, for there had been something in the incident 
which had made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy 
for many days afterwards. The memory of it how- 
ever had almost passed away, when at the corner of 
a street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman 
exhibiting a great serpent ; and again, as the reptile 
writhed, the former painful impression revived : it 
was like a peep into the lower side of the real world, 
and again for many days took all sweetness from 
sleep and food. He wondered at himself indeed, 
trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, 
having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one 
of his companions, who had put his hand into the 
mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a 
sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with 
his aversion, and he could hardly have killed or 
injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer 
by the very circumstance of their life. It was 



20 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps 
rather a moral feeling, for the face of a great serpent, 
with no grace of fur or feathers, unlike the faces of 
birds or quadrupeds, has a kind of humanity of 
aspect in its spotted and clouded nakednesSo There 
was a humanity, dusty and sordid, and as if far gone 
in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke 
suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity 
against him. Long afterwards, when it happened 
that at Rome he saw, a second time, a showman with 
his serpents, he remembered the night which had 
then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein, 
on the real greatness of those little troubles of 
children, of which older people make light ; but with 
a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how richly 
possessed his life had actually been of beautiful 
aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly what was 
repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace. 

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed ; on the whole, 
more given to contemplation than to action. Less 
prosperous in fortune than at an earlier day there 
had been reason to expect, and animating his soli- 
tude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, w^ith the 
traditions of the past, already he lived much in the 
realm of the imagination, and became betimes, as he 
was to continue all through life, something of an 
idealist, constructing the world for himself in great 
measure from w^ithin, by the exercise of meditative 
power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the 
individual for its measure of all things, there was to 
be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 21 

of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept 
other men's values of things. And the generation 
of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace 
up to the days when his life had been so like the 
reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a 
word for unworldly f The beautiful word ni/ibratilis 
comes nearest to it, perhaps ; and, in that precise 
sense, might describe the spirit in which he prepared 
himself for the sacerdotal function, hereditary in his 
family — the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the 
abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascesis, 
which such preparation involved. Like the 3^oung 
Ion in the beautiful opening of the play of Euripides, 
who every morning sweeps the temple floor wnth such 
a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to 
be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to 
their peculiar influences which he never outgrew ; 
so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly, this 
feeling would revive in him, still fresh and strong. 
That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the 
sense of dedication, survived through all the dis- 
tractions of the world, when all thought of such vo- 
cation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in 
spirit at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and 
orderliness in the conduct of life. 

And now what relieved in part this over-tension 
of soul was the lad's pleasure in the country and the 
open air ; above all, the ramble to the coast, over 
the marsh wath the dwarf roses and wild lavender, 
and the delightful signs, one after another — the aban- 
doned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild 



22 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, 

birds — that one was approaching the sea ; the long 
summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and 
sounds. And it was characteristic of him that he 
relished especiall}^ the grave, subdued, northern notes 
in all that — the charm of the French or English 
notes, as we might term them — in the luxuriant 
Italian landscape. 



CHAPTEE III. 

DILEXI DECOREM DOMUS TJJM. 

That almost morbid religious idealism, and his 
healthful love of the country, were both alike de- 
veloped by the circumstances of a journey, which 
happened about this time, when Marius was taken 
to a certain temple of JEsculapius, among the hills 
of Etruria, as was then usual in such cases, for the 
cure of some boyish sickness. The religion of ^scu- 
lapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been nat- 
uralized in Home in the old republican times ; but 
it was under the Antonines that it reached the 
height of its popularity throughout the Roman 
world. It was an age of valetudinarians, in many 
instances of imaginary ones ; but below its various 
crazes concerning health and disease, largely multi- 
plied a few years after the time of which I am 
speaking by the miseries of a great pestilence, lay 
a valuable, because partly practicable, belief that all 
the maladies of the soul might be reached through 
the subtle gatewa\^s of the body. 

Salus — salvation — for the Romans, had come to 
mean bodily sanity ; and the religion of the god of 
bodily health — Salvator^ ar^ they called him, absolute- 
ly — had a chance just then of becoming the one 
religion ; that mild and philanthropic son of Apollo 



24 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

surviving, or absorbing, all other pagan godhead 
The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary miner- 
al or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of 
the bath, came to have a kind of sacramental charac- 
ter ; so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, 
of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, be- 
yond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it ; 
the body becoming truly, in that case, but a quiet 
nandmaid of the soul. The priesthood or " fam- 
ily " of ^sculapius, a vast college, believed to be in 
possession of certain precious medical secrets, came 
nearest perhaps, of all the institutions of the pagan 
world, to the Christian priesthood ; the temples of 
the god, rich, in some instances, with the accumu- 
lated thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devo- 
tion, being really also a kind of hospitals for the 
sick, administered in a full conviction of the relig- 
iousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of a life 
spent in the relieving of pain. 

Elements of a really experimental and progressive 
knowledge there were doubtless amid this devout 
enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on the reception of 
health as a direct gift from God ; but for the most 
part his care was held to take effect through a ma- 
chinery easily capable of misuse for purposes of re- 
ligious fraud. It was above all through dreams, 
inspired by ^sculapius himself, that information as 
to the cause and cure of a malady was held to come 
to the sufferer, in a belief based on the truth that 
dreams do sometimes, for those who watch them 
carefully, give many . hints concerjaing the c^ndi' 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 25 

tionsof the body — those latent weak points at which 
disease or death may most easily break into it. In 
the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams 
had become more than ever a fashionable caprice. 
Aristeides, " the Orator," a man of undoubted intel- 
lectual power, has devoted six discourses to their 
interpretation; the really scientific Galen has re- 
corded how beneficently they had intervened in his 
own case, at certain turning-points of life ; and a 
belief in them was one of the frailties of the wise 
emperor himself. Partly for the sake of these 
dreams, living ministers of the god, more likely to 
come to one in his actual dwelling-place than else- 
where, it was almost a necessity that the patient 
should sleep one or more nights within the precincts 
of a temple consecrated to his service, during which 
time he must observe certain rules prescribed by 
the priests. 

It was for this purpose that after devoutly salu- 
ting the Lares^ as was customary before starting on 
a journey, Marius set forth one summer morning for 
the great temple which lay among the hills beyond 
the valley of the Arnus. I^ was his greatest adven- 
ture hitherto ; and he had much pleasure in all its 
details, in spite of his feverishness. Starting early, 
under the guidance of an old serving-man who drove 
the mules, with his wife who took all that was need- 
ful for their refreshment on the way and for the 
offering at the shrine, they went, under the geniai 
heat, halting now and then to pluck certain flowers 
seen for the first time on these high places, upwards, 



26 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

through a long day of sunshine, while cliffs and 
woods sank gradually below their path. The even- 
ing came as they passed along a steep white road 
with many windings among the pines, and it was 
night when they reached the temple, the lights of 
which shone out upon them as they paused before 
the gates of the sacred enclosure, and Marius be- 
came alive to a singular purity in the air. A rip- 
pling of water about the place was the only thing 
audible, as they waited till two priestly figures, speak- 
ing Greek to each other, admitted them into a large, 
white-walled and clearly lighted guest-chamber, in 
which, as he partook of a simple but wholesomely 
prepared supper, Marius still seemed to feel pleas- 
antlv the height they had attained to among the 
hills". 

The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by only 
one thing, his old fear of serpents ; for it was under 
the form of a serpent that ^sculapius had come to 
Rome; and the last definite thought of his weary 
head before he fell asleep had been a dread either 
that the god might appear, as he was said sometimes 
to do, under this hideous aspect, or perhaps one of 
those great sallow-hued snakes themselves, kept in 
the sacred place, as he had also heard was usual. 

And after an hour's feverish dreaming he awoke — 
with a cry, it would seem, for someone had entered 
the room with a light ; but the footsteps of the youth- 
ful figure which approached and sat by his bedside 
were certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the 
thought arose in his mind of some unexpected but 



MAIIIUS THE EPICUREAN. 27 

entire relief from distress, like blue sky in a storm 
at sea, would come back the memory of that gracious 
countenance which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, 
had yet a certain air of dominance over him, so that 
he seemed now for the first time to have found the 
master of his spirit. It would have been sweet to be 
the servant of him who now sat beside him speaking. 
He caught a lesson from what was then said, still 
somewhat beyond his years, a lesson in the skilled 
cultivation of life, of experience, of opportunity, 
which seemed to be the aim of the young priest's 
recommendations. The sum of them, through various 
forgotten intervals of argument, as might have hap- 
pened in a dream, was the precept, repeated many 
times under slightly varied aspects, of a diligent pro- 
motion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the 
eye would lie for him the determining influence of 
life : — he was of the number of those who, in the 
words of a poet who came long after, must be " made 
perfect by the love of visible beauty." It wan a dis- 
course conceived from the point of view of a theory 
which Marius afterwards found in Plato's Phmdrus^ 
the theory of the dr.oppo-q mo xaD.nb^, which sup^ 
poses men's spirits to be susceptible to certain in- 
fluences, diffused, like streams or currents, by fair 
things or persons visibly present — green fields and 
children's faces, for instance — into the air around 
them ; and which, with certain natures, are like 
potent material essences, conforming the seer to 
themselves as by some cunning physical necessity. 
This theory, in itself so fantastic, had however deter- 



28 MARIUS THE EPICUIIEAN. 

mined in a range of methodical suggestions, altogether 
quaint here and there from their circumstantial 
minuteness. And throughout the possibility of some 
vision of a new city coming down " like a bride out 
of heaven," a vision still indeed, it might seem, a 
long way off, but to be granted perhaps one day to 
the eyes thus trained, was presented as the motive 
of this laboriously practical course of direction. 

" If thou wouldst have all about thee like the 
colors of some fresh picture, in a clear light," so the 
discourse recommenced after a pause, " be temperate 
in thy religious motions, in love, in wine, in all things, 
and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows." To keep 
the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity 
and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place ; 
to discriminate, ever more and more exactly, select 
form and color in things from what was less select ; 
to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on 
objects, more especially, connected with the period 
of youth — on children at play in the morning, the 
trees in early spring, on young animals, on the 
fashions and amusements of young men ; to keep 
ever by him if it were but a single choice flower, a 
graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token and repre- 
sentative of the whole kingdom of such things ; to 
avoid jealousy, in his way through the world, every- 
thing repugnant to sight ; and, should any circum- 
stance tempt him to a general converse in the range 
of such objects, to disentangle himself from that 
circumstance at any cost of place, money, or oppor- 
tunity ; such were, in brief outline, the duties recog- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 29 

nized, the rights demanded, in this new formula of 
life. It was delivered with an air of conviction, as if 
the speaker could indeed see into the recesses of the 
mental and physical constitution of the listener ; and 
it came from the lips of one who had about him some 
secret fascination in his own expression of a perfect 
temperance, as if the merely negative quality of 
purit}^ the absence of any taint or flaw, exercised a 
positive influence. Long afterwards, when Marius 
read the Charmides — that other dialogue of Plato, 
into which he seems to have expressed the very 
genius of old Greek temperance — it was tljie image 
of this speaker which came back vividly before him, 
to play the chief part in the conversation. 

It was as a weighty sanction of that temperance, 
in almost visible symbolism (an outward imagery 
identifying itself v/ith unseen moralities) that the 
memory of the double experience of that night, the 
dream of the great sallow snake and the utterance 
of the young priest, always returned to him ; and it 
was a contrast which made him revolt with unfalter- 
ing instinct from the bare thought of any excess in 
sleep, or diet, or even in matters of taste, still more 
from any excess of a coarser kind. 

When he awoke again in that exceeding freshness 
which he had felt on his arrival the evening before, 
but with the clear sunlight all about him, it seemed 
as if his sickness had really departed with the terror 
of the night : a confusion had passed from the brain, 
a painful dryness from his hands. It was a delight 
merely to be alive and there ; and as he bathed In 



30 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

the fresh water, set ready for his use, the air of the 
room about him seemed like pure gold, and the very 
shadows rich with color. Summoned at length by 
one of the white-robed brethren, he went out to walk 
in the temple garden. At a distance, on either side, 
his guide pointed out to him the Houses of Birth and 
Deaths erected for the reception respectively of 
women about to become mothers and those about 
to die ; neither of those incidents being allowed to 
defile, as was thought, the actual precincts of the 
shrine. His visitor of the previous night he saw 
nowhere again. But among the official ministers of 
the place there was one, already pointed out as of 
great celebrity, and whom Marius saw often in after 
years at Rome, the physician Galen, now about 
thirty years old. He was standing with his hood 
partly drawn over his face, beside the holy well, as 
Marius and his guide approached it. 

This famous well or conduit, the original cause of 
the temple and its surrounding institutions, was sup- 
plied by the water of a spring w^hich flowed directly 
out of the rocky foundations of the shrine. From 
the rim of its basin rose a circle of trim columns, 
supporting a cupola of singular lightness and grace, 
seeming to cast no shadow across the well, and itself 
full of light from the rippling surface, through which 
might be seen the wavy figure- work of the marble 
lining below, as the spring of water rushed in. 
Legend told of a visit of ^sculapius to this place, 
earlier and happier than his first coming to Rome : 
an inscription in letters of gold, which ran round 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 31 

the base of the cupola, recorded it — Hue jyrofectus 
filius Dei 'jriaxime amavit hunc locum : — and it was 
then that this most intimately human of all the gods 
had given men this well, with all its salutary prop- 
perties, to be his visible servant or minister. The 
element itself, when received into the mouth, in con- 
sequence of its entire freedom from adhering organic 
matter, was more like a draught of wonderfully pure 
air than water ; and after tasting, Marius was told 
many mysterious circumstances concerning it, by 
one and another of the bystanders, delighting to talk 
of their marvelous well : — he who drank often of the 
liquid might well think that he had tasted of the 
Homeric lotus, so great became his desire to remain 
always on that spot ; carried to other places, it was 
almost indefinitely conservative of its fine qualities ; 
nay ! a few drops of it would amend other water ; 
and it flowed not only with unvarying abundance, 
but with a volume so oddly rhythmical, that the well 
stood always just full to the margin, whatever quan- 
tity might be drawn from it, seeming to answer with 
strange alacrity of service to human needs, like a true 
creature and pupil of the philanthropic god. And 
certainly the little crowd around seemed to find a 
singular refreshment in gazing upon it. The whole 
place appeared sensibly influenced by the amiable 
and healthful spirit of the thing. All the objects of 
the country were there at their freshest. In the 
great park-like enclosure for the maintenance of the 
sacred animals offered by the convalescent, grass and 
trees were allowed to grow with a kind of graceful 



32 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

wildness ; otherwise, all was wonderfully nice : and 
that freshness seemed even to have something moral 
in its inflnence, as if it acted upon the body and the 
merely bodily powers of apprehension, through the 
intelligence; and to the end of his visit Marius saw 
no more serpents. 

A lad was just then drawing the water for temple 
uses, and Marius followed him as he returned from 
the well, more and more impressed by the religious- 
ness of all he saw, as he passed through a long cor- 
ridor, the walls of which were well-nigh covered by 
votive inscriptions recording favors received from the 
son of Apollo,- and with a lurking fragrance of incense 
in the air, explained, as he turned aside through an 
open doorway into the temple itself. His heart 
bounded as the refined and daintv mao-nificence of 
the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood of 
early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning 
here and there, and withal a singular expression of 
sacred order, a surprising cleanliness and simplicity. 
Certain priests, men whose countenance bore a deep 
impression of cultivated mind, each with his little 
group of assistants, were gliding round silently, to 
perform their morning salutation to the god, raising 
the closed thumb and flnger of the right hand with 
a kiss in the air, as they came and went on their 
sacred business, bearing their frankincense and lustral 
water. Around the walls, at such a level that the 
worshipers might read, as in a book, the story of the 
god and his sons, the brotherhood of the Asclepiadde^ 
ran a series of imageries, carved in low relief* their 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 33 

delicate light and shade being heightened, here and 
there, with gold. Fullest of inspired and sacred ex- 
pression, as if in this place the chisel of the artist 
had indeed dealt not with marble but with the very 
breath of feeling and thought, was the scene in which 
the earliest generation of the sons of ^Esculapius 
were transformed into healing dreams ; for *' being- 
grown now too glorious to abide any longer among 
men, bv the aid of their sire thev put awav their 
mortal bodies, and came into another country, yet 
not indeed into Elysium nor into the Islands of the 
Blest. But being made like to the immortal gods, 
they began to pass about through the world, changed 
thus far from their first form that they appear 
eternally young, as many persons have seen them in 
many places — ministers and heralds of their father, 
passing to and fro over the earth, like gliding stars. 
Which thing is, indeed, the most Avonderful con- 
cerning them ! " And in this scene, as throughout 
the series, w^ith all its crowded personages, Marius 
noted on the carved faces the same peculiar union 
of unction, almost of hilarity, with a certain reserve 
and self-possession, which was conspicuous in the liv- 
ing ministrants around him. 

In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, 
hung ex voto, w^ith the richest personal ornaments, 
stood the image of JEsculapius himself, surrounded 
by choice flowering plants. It presented the type, 
still with something of the severity of the earlier art 
of Greece about it, not of an aged and crafty phy- 
sician, but of a youth, earnest and strong of aspect. 



34 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

carr^ang an ampulla or bottle in one hand, and in 
the other a traveler's staff, as a pilgrim among his 
pilgrim worshipers ; and one ot* the ministers ex- 
plained to Marius this pilgrim guise : how one chief 
source of the master's knowledge of healing had 
been the observation of the remedies resorted to by 
animals when laboring under disease or pain — what 
leaf or berry the lizard or dormouse lay upon its 
wounded fellow ; for which purpose he had for years 
led the life of a wanderer in wild places. The boy 
took his place as the last comer, a little way behind 
the group of worshipers who stood in front of the 
image; and there, lifting up his face, with the palms 
of his two hands raised and open before him, and 
taught by the priest, said his collect of thanksgiving 
and prayer (Aristeides has recorded it at the end of 
his Asclepiadce to the Inspired Dreams) : 

" O ye children of Apollo ! who in time past have 
stilled the waves of sorrow for many people, and 
lighted up a lamp of safety before those who travel 
by sea and land, be pleased, in your great condescen- 
sion, though ye be equal in glory with your elder 
brethren the Dioscuri, and your lot in immortal 
youth be as theirs, to accept this prayer, which in 
sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it aright, 
I pray you, according to your loving-kindness to 
men. Preserve me from sickness ; and endue my 
body with such a measure of health as may sufiBce 
it for the obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my 
days unhindered and in quietness." 

On the Ifist morning of his visit Marius entered 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 35 

the shrine again, and just betore bis departure the 
priest, who had been his special director during his 
stay at the place, lifting a cunningly contrived panel, 
which formed the back of one of the carved seats 
at the end of the temple, bade him look through. 
It was like the vision of a new world, by the opening 
of an unsuspected window in some familiar dwelling- 
place. He looked out upon a long-drawn valley, 
of a most cheerful aspect, hidden, by the peculiar 
conformation of the locality, from all points of obser- 
vation but this. In a green meadow at the foot of 
the olive-clad rocks just below, the novices were 
taking their exercise. The sides of the vale lay both 
alike in full sunlight; and its distant opening was 
closed by a beautifully formed mountain, from which 
the last wreaths of morning mist were rising undei 
the heat. It was the very presentment of a land 
of hope ; its hollows brimful of a shadow of blue 
flowers ; and lo ! on the one level space of the 
horizon, in a long dark line, were towers and a 
dome : and that was Pisa. — Or Rome, was it ? asked 
Marius, ready to believe the utmost, in his excite- 
ment. 

All this served, as he saw afterwards in retrospect, 
at once to strengthen and to purify a certain vein of 
character in him. Developing the ideal, pre-existent 
there, of a religious beauty, associated for the future 
with the exquisite splendor of the temple of ^^scu- 
lapius, as it dawned upon him on that morning of 
his first visit — it developed that ideal in connection 
with a vivid sense of the value of mental and bodily 



36 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

sanity. And this recognition of the beauty, even for 
the aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now ac- 
quired, operated afterwards as an influence morally 
salutary, counteracting the less desirable, or even 
hazardous tendencies of some phases of thought, 
through which he was to pass. 

He came home, brown with health, to find the 
health of his mother failing ; and about her death, 
which occurred not long afterwards, there was a cir- 
cumstance which rested with him as the cruellest 
touch of all in an event, which for a time seemed to 
have taken the light out of the sunshine. She died 
away from home, but sent for him at the last, with 
a painful effort on her part, but to his great grati- 
tude, pondering, as he always believed, that he might 
chance otherwise to look back all his life long upon 
a single fault with something like remorse, and find 
the burden a great one. For it had happened that, 
through some sudden, incomprehensible petulance of 
his, there had been an angry childish gesture, and 
a slighting word, at the very moment of her depar- 
ture, actually for the last time, remembering which, 
he would ever afterwards pray to be preserved from 
offenses against his own affections ; the thought of 
that marred parting having peculiar bitterness for 
one, who set so much store, both by principle and 
habit, on the sentiment of home. 



i < 



CHAPTER lY. 

O MARE, O LITTUS, VERUM SECRETUMQUE MOTSEION I 
QUAM MULTA INVEN1TIS,QUAM MULTA DICTATIS ! 

Pliny's Letters. 

It would hardly have been possible to feel more 
seriously than did Mariusin those grave years of his 
early life. But the death of his mother turned that 
seriousness of mere feeling into a matter of the in- 
telligence ; it made him a questioner ; and by bring- 
ing into full evidence to him the force of his affections 
and tlie probable importance of their place in his 
future, developed in him generall}^ the more human 
and earthly elements of character. A singularly 
virile consciousness of the realities of life pronounced 
itself in him ; still however, as, in the main, a poetic 
apprehension, though united already with something 
of personal ambition and the instinct of self-assertion. 
There were days when he could suspect, though it 
was a suspicion he was careful at first to put from 
him, that that early, much cherished religion of the 
villa might come to count with him as but one form 
of poetic beauty, or of the ideal, in things — as but 
one voice, in a world where there were many voices 
it would be a moral weakness not to listen to. And 
vet that one voice out of many, through its forcible 

37 



38 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

preoccupation of his childish conscience, still seemed 
to make a claim upon him of a quite exclusive 
character, defining itself as essentially one of but two 
possible leaders of his spirit ; the other of those two 
leaders proposing to him an unlimited self -expansion 
in a world of various sunshine. It was a contrast so 
pronounced as to make the easy, light-hearted, un- 
suspecting exercise of himself, among the temptations 
of the new phase of life which had now begun for 
him, seem nothing less than a rival religion, a rival 
religious service. The temptations, the various sun- 
shine, were those of the old town of Pisa, where 
Marius was now a tall schoolboy. It was a place 
lying just far enough from his home to make his rare 
visits to it in childhood seem like adventures, which 
had never failed to fill his imagination with new and 
refreshing impulses. The pensive, partly decayed 
place, which still had its commei'ce hy sea, and its 
fashion at the bathing-season, had lent, at one time 
the vivid memory of its fair streets of marble, at 
another the solemn outline of the dark hills of Luna 
in its background, at another the living glances of its 
men and women, to the thickly gathering crowd of 
impressions, out of which his notion of the world was 
then forming. And while he learned that the object, 
or the experience, as it will be in memory, is reall}' 
the chief thing to care for from first to last, in the 
conduct of our lives ; all these things were feeding 
also the idealism constitutional with him — his innate 
and habitual longing for a world altogether fairer 
tlian that he saw. The child could find his wav in 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 39 

thought along those streets of the old town, expecting 
duly the shrines at their corners, and their recurrent 
intervals of garden-courts, or side-view of distant sea. 
The great temple of the place, as he could remember 
it, on turning back once for a last look, from a wind- 
ing of his homeward road, counting its tall gray 
columns between the blue of the bay and the blue 
fields of blossomino: flax bevond ; the harbor and its 
lights ; the foreign ships lying there ; the sailors' 
chapel of Yenus and her gilded image, hung with 
votive gifts ; the seamen themselves, their women 
and children, who had a whole peculiar color- world 
of their own : — the boy's superficial delight in the 
broad light and shadow of all this was mingled with 
the sense of power, of unknown distance, of the 
danger of storm and possible death. 

It was to this place that Marius came down now 
from White-nights, to live in the house of his tutor 
or guardian, that he might attend the school of a 
famous rhetorician, and learn, among other things, 
Greek. This school, one of many imitations of 
Plato's Academy in the old Athenian garden, lay 
in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of 
cypresses, its porticoes, a house for the master, its 
chapel and images. For the memory of Marius in 
after-days, a clear morning sunlight seemed to lie 
perpetually on that severe picture in old gray and 
green. The lad went to this school daily betimes ; 
in state at first, with a young slave to carry his 
books ; and certainlv with no reluctance, for the siffht 
of his fellow-gcbolars, and their petulant activity, 



40 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

coming upon the sadder, sentimental moods of his 
childhood, awoke at once that instinct of emulation 
which is but the other side of social sympathy ; and 
he was not aware, of course, how completely the 
difference of his previous training had made him, 
even in his most enthusiastic participation in the 
ways of that little world, still essentially but a 
spectator. While all their heart was in their limited 
boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was alread}^ 
entertaining himself, in a very pleasurable medita- 
tiveness, with the little drama in action before him, 
as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger 
contest; and already with an implicit Epicureanism. 
Watching all the gallant effects of their little rivalries 
— a scene in the main of fresh delightful sunshine — 
he entered at once into the sensations of a rivalry 
beyond them, into the passion of men ; and had 
already recognized a certain appetite for fame, for 
distinction among his fellows, as his dominant motive 
to be. 

The fame he conceived for himself at this time 
was, as the reader will have anticipated, of the intel- 
lectual order, that of a poet, perhaps. And as in 
that gray monastic tranquillity of the villa, inward 
voices from the reality of unseen things had come to 
him abundantly ; so here, among the sounds and 
aspects of the shore, and amid the urbanities, the 
graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the reality, 
the tyrannous reality, of things visible that was borne 
in upon him. The real world about him — a present 
humanity not less comely, it might seem, than that of 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 41 

the old heroic days — endowing everything it touched 
upon, however remotely, down even to its little pass- 
ing tricks of fashion, with a kind of fleeting beauty, 
exercised over him just then a great fascination. 

That apprehension had come upon him very 
strongly one exceptionally line summer, the summer 
when at a somewhat earlier age than \vas usual, he 
had formally assumed the dress of manhood ; going 
into the Forum for that purpose, accompanied by 
his friends in festal array. At night, after the full 
measure of those cloudless days, he w^ould feel almost 
jaded, as if with a long succession of music and 
pictures. As he wandered through the gay streets 
or on the sea-shore, that real world seemed indeed 
boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in it, 
with a boundless appetite for experience, for material 
and spiritual adventure. Hitherto, all his rearing 
had tended to the imaginative exaltation of the 
past; but now the spectacle actually afforded to 
his untired and freely opened senses, suggested the 
reflection that the present had, it might be, really 
advanced beyond the past: and he was ready to 
boast in its ver}^ modernness. If, in a voluntary 
archaism the polite world of his day went back 
to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose 
of a fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of 
literature, and even, as we have seen, of religion ; at 
least it improved, by a shade or two of more scrupu- 
lous finish, on the old pattern ; and the new era, 
like the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the 
beginning of our own century, might perhaDs be dis- 



42 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

cerned, u waiting one just but a single step onward 
— the perfected new manner, in the consummation 
of time, alike as regards the things of the imagina- 
tion and the actual conduct of life. Only while the 
pursuit of an ideal like this demanded entire liberty 
of heart and brain, that old, staid, conservative re- 
ligion of his childhood, certainly had its being in a 
world of somewhat narrow restrictions. But then, 
the one was absolutely real, with nothing less than 
the reality of seeing and hearing ; — the other, how 
vague, shadowy, problematical ! Could its so limited 
probabilities be worth taking into account in any 
practical question as to the receiving or rejecting 
of what was indeed so real, and, on the face of it, 
so desirable ? 

And, dating from the time of his first coming to 
school, a great friendship had grown up for him, in 
that life of so few attachments — the pure and dis- 
interested friendship of schoolmates. He had seen 
Flavian for the first time on the evening of the dav 
in March on which he had arrived in Pisa, at the 
moment when his mind was full of wistful thoughts 
regarding the new life which was to begin for him 
next day, and he gazed curiously at the crowd of 
bustling scholars as they came from their classes. 
There was something in Flavian a shade disdainful, 
as he stood isolated from the rest for a moment, 
explained in part b}^ his stature and the distinction 
of his broad, smooth forehead ; tliough thei'c was a 
pleasantness, also, for the new-comer, in the somber 
blue eyes which seemed somehow to be taking a 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 43 

keener hold upon things around than is usual with 
boys. Marius knew that those proud eyes made 
kindlv note of him for a moment, and felt some- 
thing like friendship at first sight. There was a tone 
of reserved gravity there, amid perfectly disciplined 
health, which, to his fancy, carried on the expression 
of the austere light, and the clear song of the black- 
bird, on that gray March evening. Flavian indeed 
was a creature who changed much wnth the changes 
of the passing light and shade about him, and was 
brilliant enough in the early sunshine in school next 
mornine:. Of all that little ^vorld of more or less 
gifted youth, surely the center w^as this lad of servile 
birth. Prince of the school, he had gained an easy 
dominion over the old Greek master by the fascina- 
tion of his parts, and over his fellow-scholars by the 
figure he bore. He wore already the manly dress; 
and standing there in class, as he displayed his 
wonderful quickness in reckoning, or his taste in 
declaiming Homer, he was like a carved figure in 
motion, thought Marius, but wnth that indescribable 
gleam upon it w^hich the words of Homer actually 
suggested as perceptible on the visible forms of the 
gods — 

o\a 0£oh^ inevTJvoOev aiev iovtag. 

A story hung by him, a story which his comrades 
acutely connected with his habitual air of somewhat 
peevish pride. Two points were held to be clear 
amid its general vagueness — a rich stranger paid his 
schooling, and he was himself very poor ; though 



4i: MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

there was an attractive piquancy in tlie poverty of 
Flavian which in a scholar of another iloure mioht 
have been despised. Over Marius too, his dominion 
was entire. Three yeai's older than he, Flavian was 
appointed to help the younger boy in his studies, and 
Marius thus became virtually his servant in many 
things, taking his humors with a sort of grateful 
pride in being noticed at all ; and, thinking over all 
that afterwards, he found that the fascination he 
experienced had been a sentimental one, depending 
on the concession to himself of an intimacy, a certain 
tolerance of his company, granted to no other. 

That was in the earliest days ; and then, as the 
intimacy grew, the genius, the intellectual power of 
Flavian, began its sway over him. The brilliant 
youth who loved dress, and dainty food, and flowers, 
and seemed to have a natural alliance with, and claim 
upon, everything else which was physically select and 
bright, cultivated also that foppery of words, of 
choice diction, which was common among the elite 
spirits of that day ; and Marius, early an expert and 
elegant penman, transcribed for him his verses (the 
euphuism of which, amid a genuinely original power, 
was then so irresistibly delightful to him) in beauti- 
ful ink ; receiving from him in return the profit of 
his really great intellectual capacities, developed 
and accomplished under the ambitious desire to 
make his way effectively in life. Among other 
things he introduced him to the writings of a 
sprightly wit, then very busy with his pen, one 
Lucian — writings which seemed to overflow with 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 45 

that intellectual light turned upon dim places, which, 
at least in seasons of mental fair weather, can make 
people laugh where they have been wont, perhaps, 
to pray. And, surely, the sunlight which filled 
those well-remembered early mornings in school, 
had had more than the usual measure of gold in it ! 
Marius, at least, would lie awake before the time, 
thinking of the delight of the long coming hours of 
hard work in the presence of Flavian, as other boys 
dream of a holiday. 

It was almost by accident at last, so wayward and 
capricious was he, that his reserve gave way, and 
Flavian told the story of his father — a freedman, 
presented late in life, and almost against his will, 
with the liberty so fondly desired in youth, and 
with the sacrifice of a part of his jpeculium — the 
slave's diminutive hoard — amassed by many a self- 
denial, in a life necessarily hard. The rich man, 
interested in the promise of the fair child born on 
his estate, sent him to school. It was the meanness 
and dejection, nevertheless, of that unoccupied old 
age which defined the leading memory of Flavian, 
revived sometimes, after that first confidence, with 
a burst of ano^rv tears amid the sunshine. But 
nature had had her economy in nursing the strength 
of this one natural affection ; for, save his half-selfish 
care for Marius, it was the single, really generous 
part— the one piety — in the lad's character. In him 
Marius saw the spirit of unbelief, achieved, as it 
were, at one step. The much-admired freedman 's 
son, as with the privilege of ^ iiatural aristocracy. 



46 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

believed only in himself, and the brilliant and, in 
the main, sensuous gifts he had, or meant to acquire. 

And then, he had certainly yielded himself, though 
still with untouched health in a world where manhood 
comes early, to the seductions of a luxurious town, 
and Marius wondered sometimes, in the freer revela- 
tion of himself in conversation, at the extent of his 
early corruption. How often, afterwards, did evil 
things present themselves associated malignly with 
the memory of that beautiful head, and Avith a kind 
of borrowed charm and sanction in the natural grace 
of that ! To Marius at a later time, he counted for, 
as it were, an epitome of the whole pagan world itself, 
in the depth of his corruption under that perfection 
of form. And still, in his mobility, his animation, in 
his eager capacity for various life, he was so real an 
object, after that visionar}^ idealism of the villa. His 
voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the 
solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of a 
dream. A shadow, handling all things as shadows 
had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them. 

Meantime, under his guidance, Marius was learning 
quickly and abundantly, because with a good-will 
There was that in the actual effectiveness of his figure 
w^hich stimulated the younger lad to make the most 
of opportunity ; and he had experience already that 
education added largely to one's capacity for enjoy- 
ment. He was acquiring what it is ever the chief 
function of all higher education to teach — a system 
or art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic 
traits, the elements of distinction, in oyr every-day 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 47 

life — of so exclusively living in them — that the un- 
adorned remainder of it, the mere drift and dehris of 
life, becomes as though it were not. And the con- 
sciousness of this aim came with the reading of one 
particular book, then fresh in the world, with wdiich 
he fell in about this time — a book which awakened 
the poetic or romantic capacity, as perhaps some 
other book might have done, but also gave it actually, 
as another might not have done, a strongly sensuous 
direction. It made him, in that visionary reception 
of every -day life, the seer, more especially, of a 
revelation in color and form. If our modern educa- 
tion in its better efforts really conveys to any of us 
that kind of idealizing power, it does so (though 
dealing mainly as its every -day instruments with the 
most select and ideal remains of ancient literature) 
oftenest by truant reading ; and so it happened also, 
long ago, with Marius and his friend Flavian. 



CHAPTER V» 

THE GOLDEN BOOK. 

The two lads were louno^ino^ too^ether over a book, 
half-buried in a heap of dry corn, in an old granary 
— the quiet corner to which they had climbed out of 
the way of their noisier companions on one of their 
blandest holiday afternoons. They looked round ; 
the western sun smote through the broad chinks of 
the shutters. How like a picture it all was ! and it 
was precisely the place described in what they were 
reading, with just that added poetic touch in the 
book which made it delightful and select, and, in 
the actual place, the ray of sunlight, transforming 
the rough grain among the cool brown shadows 
into heaps of gold. What they were intent on was, 
indeed, the book of books, the " golden " book of that 
day, a gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple 
writing on the handsome yellow wrapper, following 
the title — Flaviane ! — it said. 



FLA.VIANE ! 


Flaviane ! 


Flaviane I 


LEGE 


Vivas ! 


Vivas I 


Feliciter I 


Floreas ! 


Gaudeas ! 



It was perfumed with oil of sandal wood, and deca 

rated with carved and gilt ivory bosses at each end oi 

the roller. 
48 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 49 

And the inside was something not less dainty and 
fine, full of the archaisms and curious felicities in 
which that age delighted, quaint terras and images 
picked fresh from the early dramatists, the life-like 
phrases of some lost poet preserved by an old gram- 
marian, racy morsels of the vernacular and studied 
prettinesses ; — all alike, mere playthings for the 
genuine power, and the natural eloquence of the 
erudite artist, unsuppressed by his erudition ; which 
however made some people angry, chiefly less well 
" got up " people, and especially those who were 
untidv from indolence. 

No ! it was certainly not that old-fashioned, un- 
conscious ease of the early literature, which could 
never come again ; which, how^ever, after all, had had 
more in common with the "infinite patience" of 
Apuleius, than with the hack-work readiness of his 
detractors, who might so well have been " self-con- 
scious" of going slip-shod. And at least he had 
succeeded in the precise literary effect he had in- 
tended, including a certain tincture of neology in 
expression — nonnihil interdimi elocidione novella 
parum signatum — in the language of Cornelius Fron- 
to, the contemporary prince of rhetoricians. What 
words he had found for conveying, with a single touch, 
the sense of textures, colors, incidents ! " Like 
jewelers' work ! Like a myrrhine vase ! " — admirers 
said of his writing. " The golden fiber in her hair, 
and the gold thread-work in her gown marked her as 
the mistress" — OAirum in comis et in tri.nrcifi^ ihi in- 
^xum hie intexium^ niatronavnprofecto conjitehatut 
4 



50 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

— he writes, with his " curious felicity," of one of his 
heroines. Aurum intextum : gold fiber — well ! there 
was something of that kind in his own work. And 
then, in an age when people, from the emperor 
Aurelius downwards, prided themselves, unwisely, 
on writing in Greek, he had written for Latin people 
in their own tongue; though still, in truth, with all 
the care of one writing a learned language. Not 
less inventive and happy were the incidents presented 
— story within story — stories with the sudden, un- 
looked-for changes of dreams. He had his humorous 
touches also : and what went to the more ordinary 
boyish taste, in those somewhat peculiar readers, what 
would have charmed boys far more purely boyish, 
was the adventure — the bear loose in the house at 
night, the wolves storming the farms in winter, the 
exploits of the robbers, their charming caves, the 
delightful thrill one had at the question — " Don't you 
know that these roads are infested by robbers ? " 

The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, 
the original land of witchcraft ; and took one up and 
down its mountains, and into its old weird towns, 
the haunts of magic and incantation, where all the 
most genuine appliances of the black art, left behind 
her bv Medea when she fled throuo^h the countrv, 
were still in use. In the city of Ilypata indeed, 
nothing seemed to be its true self — *' You ' might 
think that through the murmuring of some cadaver- 
ous spell, all things had been changed into forms 
not their own : that there was humanity in the 
hardness of the stones vou stumbled on, that the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 51 

birds you heard singing were feathered men, that 
the trees around the walls drew their leaves from a 
like source. The statues seemed about to move, the 
walls to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in 
prophecy ; nay ! the very sky and the sunbeams, as 
if they might suddenly cry out." There are witches 
there who can draw down the moon, or at least the 
lunar virus — that white fluid she sheds ; to be 
found, so rarely, " on lofty, heathy places ; which is 
a poison, and a touch of which will drive men mad." 
And in one very remote village lives the sorceress 
Pamphile, who turns her neighbors into various 
animals. What true humor in the scene where, 
after mounting the rickety stairs, Lucius, peeping 
curiously through a chink in the door, is a spectator 
of the transformation of the old witch herself into 
a bird, that she may take flight to the object of her 
affections— into an owl! "First she stripped off 
every rag she had. Then opening a certain chest 
she took from it many small boxes, and removing 
the lid of one of them, rubbed herself over for a 
long- time, from head to foot, with an ointment it 
contained, and after much low muttering to her 
lamp, began at last to jerk and shake her limbs. 
And as her limbs moved to and fro, out burst the 
soft feathers ; stout wings came forth to view ; her 
nose grew hard and hooked ; her nails were crooked 
into claws ; and Pamphile was an owl. She uttered 
a queasy screech ; and, leaping little by little from 
the ground to make trial of herself, fled presently, 
on full wing, out of doors." 



62 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

By clumsy imitation of that, Lucius, the hero of 
the romance, transforms himself, not as he had in- 
tended into a showy winged creature, but into the 
animal which has given name to the book ; for, 
throughout it, there runs a vein of racy, 'homely 
satire on the love of magic then prevalent, curiosity 
about which had led Lucius to meddle with the old 
woman's appliances. " Be you my Yenus," he says 
to the pretty maid-servant who has introduced him 
to the view of Pamphile, " and let me stand by you 
a winged Cupid ; " and, freely applying the magic 
ointments, sees himself transformed, " not into a 
bird, but into an ass ! " 

Well ! the proper remedy for that is a meal of 
roses, could such be found ; and many are his 
quaintly picturesque attempts to come by them at 
that adverse season ; as he does at last, when the 
grotesque procession of Isis passes by, with a bear 
and other strange animals in its train, and the ass 
following along with the rest suddenly crunches the 
chaplet of roses carried in the high priest's hand. 

Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, 
with more than the outside of an ass ; '* though I 
was not so much a fool, nor so truly an ass," he 
tells us, when he happens to be left alone with a 
daintily spread table, " as to neglect this most de- 
licious fare, and feed upon coarse hay." For, in 
truth, all through the book, there is an unmistakably 
real feeling for asses, with bold. Swift- like touches, 
and a genuine animal breadth. Lucius was the 
original ass, who peeping slily from the window of 



MARIU8 THE EPICUREAN. 5,^ 

his hiding-place forgot all about the big shadow he 
cast just above him, and gave occasion to the joke 
or proverb about " the peeping ass and his shadow." 

But the merely marvelous, a delight in which is 
one of the really serious parts in most boys, passed 
at times, those young readers still feeling the fasci- 
nation of it, into what French writers call the 
macabre —thiit species of almost insane preoccupation 
with the materialities of the moldering flesh, that 
luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption, which 
was connected, in this writer at least, with not a 
little obvious coarseness. It was a strange notion 
of the coarse lust of the actual world, which Marius 
got from some of these episodes. " I am told," 
they read, " that when foreigners are interred, the 
old witches are in the habit of out-racing the funeral 
procession, to ravage the corpse" — in order to ob- 
tain certain cuttings and remnants from it, with 
which to injure the living ; " especially if the witch 
has happened to cast her eye upon some goodly 
voung man." And the scene of the nio^ht-watchino- 
of a dead body lest the witches should come to tear 
off the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of Theophile 
Gautier. 

But set as one of the episodes in the main narrative 
— a true gem amid its mockeries, its coarse thougli 
genuine humanity, its burlesque horrors, came the 
tale of Cupid and Psyche, full of brilliant lifelike 
situations — speciosa locis — and abounding in lovely 
visible imagery (one seemed to see and handle the 
golden hair, the fresh flowers, the precious works of 



54 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

art, in it) yet full also of a gentle idealism, so that 
you might take it, if you chose, for an allegory. 
With a concentration of all his finer literary gifts^ 
Apuleius had gathered into it the floating star- 
matter of many a delightful old story. — 

The story of Cupid and Psyche. 

In a certain city lived a king and queen who had 
three daughters exceeding fair. But the beauty of 
the two elder, though pleasant to behold, 3^et passed 
not the measure of human praise, while such was the 
loveliness of the youngest that men's speech was too 
poor to commend it worthily and could express it 
not at all. Many of the citizens and of strangers, 
whom the fame of this excellent vision had gathered 
thither, confounded by that matchless beauty, could 
but kiss the finger-tips of their right hands at sight 
of her, as in adoration to the goddess Venus herself. 
And soon a rumor passed through the country that 
she whom the blue deep had borne, forbearing her 
divine dignity, was even then moving among men, 
or that, by some fresh germination from the stars, 
not the sea now, but the earth, had put forth a new 
Yenus, endued w4th the flower of virginity. 

This belief, with the fame of the maiden's loveli 
ness, went dailv further into distant lands, so that 
many people were drawn together to behold that 
glorious model of the age. Men sailed no longer to 
Paphos, to Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the 
goddess Yenus; her sacred rites were neglected, her 
images stood uncrowned, the cold ashes were left to 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 55 

disfigure her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that 
men's prayers were offered, to a human countenance 
they looked, in propitiating so great a godhead : 
when the girl went forth in the morning they strewed 
flowers on her way, and the victims proper to that 
unseen goddess were presented as she passed along. 
This conveyance of divine worship to a mortal 
kindled meantime the anger of the true Yenus. 
*' Lo ! now the ancient parent of nature," she cried, 
" the fountain of all elements! Behold me, Yenus, 
benign mother of the world, sharing my honors with 
a mortal maiden, while my name, built up in heaven, 
is profaned by the mean things of earth ! Shall a 
perishable woman bear my image about with her ? 
In vain did the shepherd of Ida prefer me ! Yet 
shall she have little jov, whosoever she be, of her 
usurped and unlawful loveliness ! " Thereupon she 
called to her that winged, bold boy, of evil ways^ 
who wanders armed by night through men's houses, 
spoiling their marriages ; and stirring yet more by 
her speech his inborn wantonness, she led him to the 
city and showed him Psyche as she walked. 

" I pray thee," she said, " give thy mother a full 
revenge. Let this maid become the slave of an un- 
worthy love." Then, embracing him closely, she 
departed to the shore and took her throne upon the 
crest of the wave. And lo ! at her unuttered will, 
her ocean-servants are in waiting : the daughters of 
Nereus are there singing their song, and Portunus, 
and Salacia, and the tiny charioteer of the dolphin^ 
with a host of Tritons leaping through the billows 



56 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

And one blows softly through his sounding sea-shelly 
another spreads a silken web against the sun, a third 
presents the mirror to the eyes of his mistress, while 
the others swim side by side below, drawing her 
chariot. Such was the escort of Venus as she went 
upon the sea. 

Psj^che meantime, aware of her loveliness, had no 
fruit thereof. All people regarded and admired, but 
none sought her in marriage. It was but as upon 
the finished work of the craftsman that they gazed 
upon that divine likeness. Her sisters, less fair than 
she, were happily wedded. She, even as a widow, 
sitting at home, wept over her desolation, hating in 
her heart the beauty in which all men were pleased. 

And the king, supposing that the gods were angry, 
inquired of the oracle of Apollo, and Apollo answered 
him thus : " Let the damsel be placed on the top of a 
certain mountain, adorned as for the bed of marriage 
and of death. Look not for a son-in-law of mortal 
birth ; but for that evil serpent-thing, by reason of 
whom even the gods tremble and the shadows of 
Styx are afraid." 

So the king returned home and made known the 
oracle to his wife. For many days she lamented, 
but at last the fulfilment of the divine precept was 
urgent upon her, and the company was made ready 
to conduct the maiden to her deadly bridal. And 
now the nuptial torch gathers dark smoke and ashes ; 
the pleasant sound of the pipe changes into a cry ; 
the marriage hymn concludes in a sorrowful wailing. 
B^Iqw her yellow w©<,idin|^-yoil the bride shook 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 57 

away her tears : insomuch that the wliole city was 
afflicted together at the ill-luck of the stricken 
house. 

But the mandate of the god impelled the hapless 
Psvche to her fate, and, those solemnities being 
ended, the funeral of the living soul goes forth, all 
the people following. Psyche, bitterly weeping, 
assists not at her marriage but at her own obsequies, 
and while the parents hesitate to accomplish a thing 
so unholy the daughter cries to them : " Wherefore 
torment your luckless age by long weepings! This 
was the prize of rav extraordinary beautv ! When 
all people celebrated us with divine honors, and with 
one voice named the New Yenus^ it was then ye 
should have wept for me as one dead. In^ow at last 
I understand that that one name of Venus has been 
my ruin. Lead me and set me upon the appointed 
place. I am in haste to submit to that well-omened 
marriage, to behold that goodly spouse. Why delay 
the coming of him who was born for the destruction 
of the whole world ? " 

She was silent, and with firm step went on the way. 
And they proceeded to the appointed place on a steep 
mountain, and left there the maiden alone, and took 
their way homewards dejectedly. The wretched 
parents, in their close-shut house, yielded themselves 
to perpetual night; while to Psyche, fearful and 
trembling and weeping sore upon the mountain-top, 
comes the gentle Zephyrus. lie lifts her gently, and, 
with vesture floating on either side, bears her by his 
own soft breathing over the windings of the hills, and 



58 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

sets her lightly amoog the flowers in the bosom of a 
valley t)e]o\v. 

Psyche, in those delicate grassy places, lying sweetly 
on her dewy bed, rested from the agitation of her soul 
and arose in peace. And lo ! a grove of mighty trees, 
with a fount of water, clear as glass, in the midst ; 
and hard by the \vater, a dwelling-place, built not 
by human hands but by some divine cunning. One 
recognized, even at the entering, the delightful hos- 
telry of a god. Golden pillars sustained the roof, 
arclied most curiously in cedar-wood and ivory. 
The walls were hidden under wrought silver: — all 
tame and woodland creatures leaping forward to the 
visitor's gaze. Wonderful indeed was the craftsman, 
divine or half-divine, who by the subtlety of his art 
had breathed so wild a soul into the silver! The 
very pavement was distinct with pictures in goodly 
stones. In the glow of its precious metal the house 
is its own daylight, having no need of the sun. Well 
might it seem a place fashioned for the conversation 
of o'ods with men ! 

Psyche, drawn forward by the delight of it, came 
near, and, her courage growing, stood within the 
doorway. One by one, she admired the beautiful 
things she saw ; and, most wonderful of all ! no lock, 
no chain, nor living guardian protected that great 
treasure-house. But as she gazed there came a voice 
— a voice, as it were, unclothed of its bodily vesture — 
"Mistress?" it said, "all these things are thine. 
Lie down, and relieve thy weariness, and rise again 
for the bath when thou wilt. We thy servants, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 59 

whose voice thou hearest, will be beforehand with 
our service, and a royal feast shall be ready.'* 

And Psyche understood that some divine care was 
providing, and, refreshed with sleep and the bath, 
sat down to the feast. Still she saw no one ; only 
she heard words falling here and there, and had 
voices ak^ne to serve her. And the feast being 
ended, one entered the chamber and sang to her 
unseen, while another struck the chords of a harp, 
invisible with him who played on it. Afterwards, 
the sound of a company singing together came to 
her, but still so that none was present to sight : yet 
it appeared that a great multitude of singers was 
there. 

And the hour of evening inviting her, she climbed 
into the bed ; and as ths night was far advanced, 
behold the sound of a ce: tain clemency approaches 
her. Then, fearing for her maidenhood, in so gre^it 
solitude, she trembled, and more than any evil she 
knew dreaded tliat she knew not. And now the 
husband, that unknown husband, drew near, and 
ascended the couch, and made her his wife ; an<l lo ! 
before the rise of dawn he had departed hastily. 
And the attendant voices ministered to the needs of 
the newly married. And so it happened with her 
for a long: seasoa. And as nature has willed, that 
new thing, by continual use, became a delight to 
her, and the sound of the voice grew to be her solace 
in that condition of loneliness and uncertainty. 

One night the bridegroom spoke thus to his be- 
loved : " O ! Psyche, most pleasant bride ! Fortune 



^0 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

has grown stern with us, and threatens thee with 
mortal peril. Thy sisters, troubled at the report of 
thy death and seeking some trace of thee, will come 
to the mountain-top. But if by chance their cries 
reach thee, answer not, neither look forth at all, lest 
thou bring sorrow upon me and destruction upon 
thyself." Then Psyche promised that she would do 
according to his will. But the bridegroom had lied 
away again with the night, And all that day she 
spent in tears, repeating that she was now dead in- 
deed, shut up in that golden prison ; powerless to 
console her sisters, sorrowing after her, or to see 
their faces : and so went to rest weeping. 

And after a while came the bridegroom again, and 
lay down beside her, and embracing her as she w^ept, 
complained, "Was this thy promise, my Psyche'^ 
"What have I to hope from thee ? Even in the arms 
of thy husband thou ceasest not from pain. Do 
now as thou wilt. Indulge thine own desire, though 
it seeks what will ruin thee. Yet wilt thou remem- 
ber my warning, repentant too late." Then, pro- 
testing that she is like to die, she obtains from him 
that he suffer her to see her sisters, and to present to 
them moreover what gifts she would of golden 
ornaments; but therewith he ofttimes advised her 
never at any time, yielding to pernicious counsel, 
to inquire concerning his bodily form, lest she fall, 
through unholy curiosity, from so great a height of 
fortune, nor feel ever his embrace again. '' I would 
die a hundred times," she said, cheerful at last, 
" rather than be deprived of thy most sweet usage. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 61 

1 love thee as my own soul, beyond comparison 
even with Love himself. Only bid thy servant 
Zephyrus bring hither my sisters, as he brought me. 
My honeycomb! My husband! Thy Psyche's 
breath of life ! " So he promised ; and after the 
embraces of the night, ere the light appeared, van- 
ished from the hands of his bride. 

And the sisters, coming to the place where Psyche 
had been abandoned, wept loudly among the rocks, 
and called upon her by name, so that the sound 
came down to her, and running out of the palace 
distraught, she cried, " Wherefore afflict your souls 
with lamentation ? I whom you mourn am here." 
Then summoning Zephyrus, she reminded him of 
her husband's bidding; and he bare them down with 
a gentle blast. " Enter now," she said, '" into my 
house, and relieve your sorrow in the company of 
Psyche jouv sister." 

And Psyche displayed to them all the treasures 
of the golden house, and its great family of minister- 
ing voices, nursing in them the malice which was 
already at their hearts. And at last one of them 
asks curiously who the lord of that celestial array 
mav be, and what manner of man her husband I 
And Psyche answered dissemblingly, " A young 
man, handsome and mannerly, with a goodly beard. 
For the most part he hunts upon the mountains." 
And lest the secret should slip from her in the way 
of further speech, loading her sisters with gold and 
gems, she summoned Zephyrus to bear them away. 

And they returned home, on fire with envy. '* See 



62 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

now the injustice of fortune I " cried one. " We, 
the elder children, have been given like servants to 
be the wives of strangers, while the youngest is pos- 
sessed of so o^reat riches, who scarcelv knows how to 
use them. You saw, sister ! what a hoard of wealth 
is lying in the house ; what glittering goa'iis ; what 
splendor of precious gems, besides all that gold trod- 
den under foot. If she indeed hath, as she said, a 
bridegroom so goodly, then no one in all the world 
is happier. And it may be that that husband, being 
of divnne nature, will make her too a goddess. Xay ! 
so in truth it is. It was even thus she bore herself. 
Already she looks aloft and breathes divinity ; who, 
but a woman, has pure voices for her handmaidens, 
and can command the winds." " Think," answered 
the other, " how arrogantly she dealt with us, grudg- 
ing us these trifling gifts out of all that store, 
and when she found our company a burden, caus- 
ing us to be hissed and driven away from her 
through the air ! But I am no woman if she keep 
her hold on this f]rreat fortune: and if the insult 
done us has touched thee too, take we counsel to- 
gether. Meanwhile let us hold our peace, and know 
naught of her, alive or dead. For they are not 
truly happy of whose happiness other folk are 
unaware." 

And the bridegroom, whom still she knows not, 
warns her thus a second time, as he talks with her 
by night: '* Seest thou what peril besets thee? 
Those cunning wolfs have made ready for thee their 
snares, of which the sum is that they persuade thee 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 63 

to search into the fashion of my countenance, the 
seeing ot which, as I have told thee often, will be 
the seeing of it no more forever. But do tliou 
neither listen nor make answer to aught regarding 
thy husband. Besides, we have sown also the seed 
of our race. Even now this bosom grows with a 
child to be born to us, a child, if thou but keep our 
secret, of divine quality ; if thou profane it, subject 
to death." And Psyche was glad at the tidings, re- 
joicing in that solace of a divine seed, and in the 
glory of that pledge of love to be. and the dignity 
of the name of mother. Anxiously she noted the 
increase of the days, the waning months. And 
again, as he tarries briefly beside her, the bride- 
groom repeats his warning : " Even now the sword 
is drawn with which thy sisters seek thy life. Have 
pity on thyself, sweet wife, and upon our child, and 
see not those evil women again." But the sisters 
made their way once more into the palace, and cried 
to her in wily tones, " O ! Psyche ! and thou too 
wilt be a mother! How great will be the joy at 
home ! Happy indeed shall we be to have the nurs- 
ing of the golden child. Truly if he be answerable 
to the beauty of his parents, it will be a birth of 
Cupid himself." 

So, little by little, they stole upon the soul of 
their sister. She, meanwhile, bids the lyre to sound 
for their delight and the playing is heard. She bids 
the pipes to move and the quire to sing, and the 
music and the singing come invisibly, soothing the 
mind of the listener with sweetest modulation. But 



64 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

not even thereby was their malice )3ut to sltt!|) : otice 
more they seek to know what manner of husband 
she has and whence that seed. And Psyche, simple 
over-much, forgetting her first story, answers, " My 
husband comes from a far country, trading for great 
sums. He is already of middle age, with whitening 
locks." And therewith she dismisses them again. 

And returning home upon the soft breath of 
Zephyrus, one cried to the other, '* What shall be 
said of so ugly a lie ? He who was a young man 
with florid beard is now in middle life. It must be 
that she told a false tale : else is she indeed ignorant 
what manner of man he is. Howsoever it be, let us 
destroy her quickly. For if she indeed knows not, 
be sure that her bridegroom is one of the gods ; it is 
a god she bears in her womb. And let that be far 
from us ! If she be called mother of a god, then 
will my life be more than I can bear." 

So, full of rage against her, they returned to 
Psyche, and said to her craftily, " Thou livest in an 
ignorant bliss, all incurious of thy real danger. It 
is a deadly serpent, as we certainly know, that comes 
to sleep by thy side. Remember tiie words of the 
oracle, which declared thee destined to a cruel beast. 
There are those who have seen it at nightfall, com 
ing back from its feeding. It will be not much 
longer, they say, ere it will end its blandishments. 
It but waits for the babe to be formed in thee, tliat 
it may devour thee by so much the richer. If indeed 
the solitude of this musical place, or it may be the 
loathsome commerce of this hidden love, delight 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 65 

thee, we at least with sisterly piety have done our 
part." And at last the unhappy Psyche, so simple 
and frail of soul, was carried away by the terror of 
their words, and losing memory of her husband's 
precepts and her own promise, brought uf)on lierself 
a great calamity. Trembling and turning pale she 
answers them, " And they who tell those things, it 
may be, speak the truth. For in very i]eei{ never 
have I seen the face of my husband, nor know I at 
all what manner of man he is. Always he frights 
me diligently from the sight of him, threatening 
some great evil should I too curiously look upon his 
face. Do ye, if ye can help your sister in her great 
peril, stand by her now." 

Her sisters answered her, *' The way of safety we 
have well considered, and will teach thee. Take a 
sharp knife, and hide it in that part of the couch 
where thou art Avont to lie ; take also a lamp filled 
with oil, and set it privil}'^ behind the curtain. And 
when he shall have drawn up his coils into the ac- 
customed place, and thou hearest him breathe in 
sleep, slip then from his side and discover the lamp, 
and, knife in hand, put forth all thy strength, and 
strike off the serpent's head." And so they departed 
in haste. 

And Psyche left alone (alone but for the furies 
which beset her) is tossed up and down in her dis- 
tress, like a wave of the sea ; and though her will is 
firm, yet, in the moment of putting hand to the deed, 
she falters, and is torn asunder by various apprehen- 
sion of that great calamity upon her. She hastens 



(56 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

and anon delays ; is now full of distrust and now ol 
angry courage : under one bodily form she loathes 
the monster, and loves the bridegroom. But evening 
ushers in the night ; and at last in haste she makes 
ready for the terrible deed. Darkness came, and the 
bridegroom ; and he first, after some faint essay of 
love, fell into a deep sleep. 

And she, erewhile of no strength, the hard purpose 
of destiny assisting her, is confirmed in force. With 
lamp plucked forth, and the knife in her hand, she 
put by her sex ; and lo ! as the secrets of the bed 
became manifest, the sweetest and most gentle of all 
creatures, Cupid himself, reclined there, in his own 
proper loveliness ! At the sight of him, the very 
flame of the lamp kindled more gladly I But Psycho 
was afraid at the vision, and, faint of soul, trembled 
backward upon her knees, and would have hidden 
away the steel in her own bosom. But the knife 
slipped from her hand : and now, undone, yet ofttimes 
looking upon the beauty of that divine countenance, 
she lives again. She sees the locks of that golden 
head, pleasant with the unction of the gods, shed 
down in graceful entanglement behind and before, 
about the ruddy cheeks and white throat. The 
pinions of the winged god, yet fresh with the dew, 
are spotless upon his shoulders ; the delicate plumage 
wavering over them as they lie at rest. Smooth he 
was, and, touched with light, worthy of Venus his 
motlier. At the foot of the couch lay his bow nnd 
arrows, the instruments of his power, propitious to 
jnen 



MA.RIUS THE EPICUREAN. 67 

And Psyche, gazing hungrily upon all that, drew 
an arrow from the quiver, and trying its point upon 
her thumb, tremulous still, drav^e in the barb, so that 
a drop of blood came forth. Thus fell she, by her 
own act, and unaware, into the love of Love. Falling 
upon the bridegroom, with indrawn breath and a 
hurry of kisses from her eager and open li})s, she 
shuddered as she thought how brief that sleep might 
be. And it chanced that a drop of burning oil fell 
from the lamp upon the god's shoulder. Ah ! mala- 
droit minister of love, thus to wound him from whom 
all fire comes; though 'twas a lover, I trow, first 
devised thee, to have the fruit of his desire even in 
the darkness ! At the touch of the fire the god 
started up, and beholding the overthrow of her faith, 
quietly took flight from her embraces. 

And Psyche, as he rose upon the wing, laid hold 
on him with her two hands, and hung upon him in 
his passage through the air, till she sank to the earth 
through weariness. And as she lay there, the divine 
lover, tarrying still, lighted upon a cypress tree which 
grew near, and, from the top of it, spake thus to her, 
in great emotion. " Foolish one ! unmindful of the 
command of Venus, my mother, who had devoted 
thee to the bed of one of base degree, I fled to thee 
in his stead. Now know I that that was vainly done. 
Into mine own flesh pierced mine arrow, and I made 
thee my wife, only that I might seem a monster 
beside thee — that thou shouldst seek to wound the 
head wherein lay the eyes so full of love to thee ! 
Again and again,^ I thought to put thee on thy guard 



68 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

concerning these things, and warned thee in loving, 
kindness. Now I would but punish thee by my flight 
hence." And therewith he winged his way into the 
deep sky 

Psyche, prostrate upon the earth, and following far 
as sight might reach the flight of the bridegroom, 
wept and lamented ; and when the breadth of space 
had parted him wholly from her, cast herself down 
from the bank of a river which was near. But the 
stream, turning gentle in honor of the god, put her 
forth again unhurt upon its margin. And as it 
happened, Pan, the rustic god, was sitting just then 
by the waterside, embracing, in the body of a reed, 
the goddess Canna ; teaching her to respond to him 
in all varieties of slender sound. Hard by, his flock 
of goats browsed at will. And the shaggy god called 
her, wounded and outworn, kindly to him and said, 
" I am but a rustic herdsman, pretty maiden, yet wise, 
by favor of my great age and long experience ; and, 
if I guess truly by those faltering steps, by thy sorrow- 
ful eyes and continual sighing, thou laborest with 
excess of love. Listen then to me, and seek not 
death again, in the stream or otherwise. Put aside 
thy woe, and turn thy prayers to Cupid. He is in 
truth a delicate youth : win him by the delicacy of 
thy service." 

So the shepherd-god spoke, and Psyche, answering 
nothing, but with a reverence to his serviceable deity, 
went on her wa}^ And while she, in her search after 
Cupid, wandered through many lands, he was lying 
in the chamber of his mother, heartsick. And the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 69 

white bird wiiich floats over the waves plunged in 
(liaste into the sea, and approaching Yenus as she 
bathed, made known to her that her son lies afflicted 
<vith some grievous hurt, doubtful of life. And 
Venus cried, angrily, ^' My son, then, has a mistress ! 
And it is Psyche, who witched away my beauty and 
was the rival of my godhead, whom he loves ! " 

Therewith she issued from the sea, and returning 
to her golden chamber, found there the lad, sick, as 
she had heard, and cried from the doorway, " Well 
done, truly ! to trample thy mother's precepts under 
foot, to spare my enemy that cross of an unworthy 
love ; nay, unite her to thyself, child as thou art, that 
I might have a daughter-in-law who hates me ! I will 
make thee repent of thy sport, and thft savor of 
thy marriage bitter. There is one who shall chasten 
that body of thine, put out thy torch and unstring 
thy bow. Not till she has plucked forth that hair, 
into which so oft these hands have smoothed the 
golden light, and sheared away thy wings, shall I 
feel the injury done me avenged." And with that, 
she hastened in anger from the doors." 

And Ceres and Juno met her, and sought to know 
fche meaning of her troubled countenance. " Ye 
come in season," she cried ; *' I pray you, find for me 
Psyche. It must needs be that ye have heard the 
disgrace of my house." And they, ignorant of what 
was done, would have soothed her anger, saying, 
" What fault. Mistress ! hath thy son committed, 
that thou wouldst destroy the girl he loves? 
Knowest thou not that he is now of age ? Because 



70 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

he wears his vears so lio-htiy must he seem to thee 

t- CD « 

ever but a child 'i Wilt thou forever thus pry into 
the pastimes of thy son, always accusing his wanton- 
ness, and bkiming in him those delicate wiles which 
are all thine own ? " Thus, in secret fear of the boy's 
bow, did they seek to please him with their gracious 
patronage. But Yenus, angry at their light taking of 
her wrongs, turned her back upon them ; and with 
hasty steps took her way once more to the sea. 

And in the meanwhile, Psyche, tost in soul, wander- 
ing hither and thither, rested not night nor day, in 
the pursuit of her husband, desiring, if she might not 
soothe his anger by the endearments of a wife, at the 
least to propitiate him with the prayers of a hand- 
maid. And seeing a certain temple on the top of 
a high mountain, she said, " Who knows whether 
yonder place be not the abode of my lord ? " Thither, 
therefore, she turned her steps ; hastening now the 
more because desire and hope pressed her on, weary 
as she was with the labors of the way ; and so, 
painfully measuring out the highest ridges of the 
mountain, she drew near to the sacred couches. She 
sees ears of wheat, in heaps or twisted into chaplets ; 
ears of barley also : and there were sickles and all 
the instruments of harvest, lying there in disorder, 
thrown at random from the hands of the laborers in 
the great heat. These she curiously sets apart, one 
by one, duly ordering them ; for she said within her- 
self, '* I may not neglect the shrines, nor the holy 
service, of any god there be, but much rather win 
by supplication the kindly mercy of them all." 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 71 

And Ceres found her as she bent sadly on her 
task, and cried aloud, *" Alas, Psyche ! Venus, in 
the furiousness of her anger, tracks thy footsteps 
through the world, seeking for thee to pay her the 
utmost penalty ; and thou, thinking of anything 
rather than thine own safety, hast taken on thee 
the care of what belongs to me ! " Then Psyche 
fell down at her feet, and sweeping the floor with 
her hair, and washing the footsteps of the goddess 
with her tears, besought her mercy, with many 
prayers : — " By the gladdening rites of harvest, by 
the lighted lamps and m3'stic marches of the Mar- 
riage and mysterious Invention of thy daughter 
Proserpine, and by all beside that the holy place of 
Attica veils in silence, minister, I pray thee, to the 
sorrowful heart of Psyche ! Suffer me to hide my- 
self but for a few days among the heaps of corn, till 
time has softened the anoer of the goddess, and mv 
strength, out-worn in my long travail, be recovered 
by a little rest." 

But Ceres answered her, " Truly thy tears move 
me, and I would fain help thee; only I dare not 
incur the ill-will of my kinswoman. Depart hence 
as quickly as may be." And Psyche, repelled 
against hope, and afflicted now with twofold sorrow, 
making her way back again, beheld among the half- 
lighted woods of the valley below a sanctuary 
builded with cunninc: art. And that she mio^ht lose 
no way of hope, howsoever doubtful, she drew near 
to the sacred doors. She sees there gifts of price, 
and garments fixed upon the door-posts and to the 



72 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

branches of the trees, wrought with letters of gold 
which told the name of the goddess to whom they 
were dedicated, with thanksgiving for that she had 
done. So, with bent knee and hands laid about the 
glowing altar, she prayed saying, " Sister and 
spouse of Jupiter ! be thou to these my desperate 
iortunes, Juno the Auspicious ! I know that thou 
c^ost willingly help those in travail with child ; de- 
liver me from the peril that is upon me." And as 
she prayed thus, Juno in the majesty of her god- 
head, was straightway present, and answered, 
" Would that I might incline favorably to thee ; but 
against the will of Yenus, whom I have ever loved 
as a daughter, I may not, for very shame, grant thy 
prayer." 

And Psyche, dismayed by this new shipwreck of 
her hope, communed thus with herself, " Whither, 
from the midst of the snares that beset me, shall I 
take my way once more? In what dark solitude 
shall I hide me from the all-seeino- eve of Venus? 
What if I put on at length a man's courage, and 
yielding myself unto her as my mistress, soften by 
a humility not yet too late the fierceness of her 
purpose ? Who knows but that I may find him 
also whom my soul seeketh after, in the abode of 
his mother ? " 

And Yenus, renouncing all earthly aid in her 
search, prepared to return to heaven. She ordered 
the chariot to be made ready, v/hich Yulcan had 
wrought for her as a marriage-gift, with a cunning 
of hand which left his work so much the richer by 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 73 

the weight of gold it had lost under his tool. From 
the multitude which housed about the bed-chamber 
of their mistress, white doves came forth, and with 
joyful motions bent their painted necks beneath the 
yoke. Behind it, with playful riot, the sparrows 
sped onward, with other birds sweet of song, making 
known by their soft notes the approach of the god- 
dess. Eagle and cruel hawk alarmed not the quire- 
ful family of Yenus. And the clouds broke away, 
as the uttermost ether opened to receive her, daughter 
and goddess, with great joy. 

And Yenus passed straightway to the house of 
Jupiter to beg of him the use of Mercury, the god 
of Speech. And Jupiter refused not her prayer. 
And Yenus and Mercury descended from heaven 
together ; and as they went, the former said to the 
latter, " Thou knowest, my brother of Arcady, that 
never at anv time have I done anvthino: without 
thy help; for how long time, moreover, I have 
sought a certain maiden in vain. And now naught 
remains but that, by thy heraldry, I proclaim a re- 
ward for whomsoever shall find her. Do thou my 
bidding quickly." And with that she conveyed to 
him a little scrip, in the which was written the 
name of Psyche, with other things ; and so returned 
home. 

And Mercury failed not in his office ; but depart- 
ing into all lands, proclaimed that whosoever should 
deliver up to Yenus the fugitive girl, should receive 
from herself seven kisses — one thereof full of the 
inmost honey of her throat. With that the doubt 



7i MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

of Psyche was ended. And now, as she came near 
to the doors of Venus, one of the household, whose 
name was Use-and-Wont, ran out to her, crying, 
"Hast thou learned, Wicked Maid! now at last! 
that thou hast a mistress ? " And seizing her 
roughly by the hair, drew her into the presence of 
Venus. And when Venus saw her, she cried out, 
saying, " Thou hast deigned then to make thy salu- 
tations to thy mother-in-law. Now will I in turn 
treat thee as becometh a dutiful daughter-in- 
law ! " 

And she took barley and millet and poppy-seed, 
every kind of o-rain and seed, and mixed them to- 
gether, and laughed, and said to her : " Methinksso 
plain a maiden can earn lovers only by industrious 
ministry : now will I also make trial of thy service. 
Sort me this heap of seed, the one kind from the 
others, grain by grain ; and get thy task done before 
the evening." And Psyche, stunned by the cruelty 
of her bidding, was silent, and moved not her hand 
to the inextricable heap. And there came forth a 
little ant, which had understanding of the difficulty 
of her task, and took pity upon the consort of the 
god of Love : and he ran deftly hither and thither, 
and called together the whole army of his fellows. 
'* Have pity," he cried, " nimble scholars of the 
Earth, mother of all things ! have pity upon the 
wife of Love, and hasten to help her in her perilous 
effort." Then, one upon the other, the hosts of 
the insect people hurried together ; and they sorted 
asunder the whole heap of seed, separating every 



MARIU8 THE EPICUREAN. 75 

grain after its kind, and so departed quickly out of 
sight. 

And at nightfall Venus returned, and seeing that 
task finished with so wonderful diligence, she cried, 
" The work is not thine, thou naughty maid, but his 
in whose eyes thou hast found favor." And calling 
her again in the morning, " See now the grove," she 
said, '' beyond yonder torrent. Certain sheep feed 
there, whose fleeces shine with gold. Fetch me 
straightway a lock of that precious stuff, having 
gotten it as thou mayst." 

And Psyche went forth willingly, not to obey the 
command of Yenus, but even to seek a rest from her 
labor in the depths of the river. But out of the 
river, the green reed, lowly mother of music, spake 
to her : " O ! Psyche, pollute not these waters by 
thy destruction, and approach not that terrible 
flock ; for, as the heat groweth, they wax fierce : 
lie down under yon plane-tree, till the quiet of the 
river's breath have soothed them. Thereafter thou 
mayst shake down the fleecy gold from the trees of 
the grove, for it holdeth by the leaves." 

And Psyche, instructed thus by the simple reed, 
in the humanity of its heart, filled her bosom with 
the soft golden stuff, and returned to Venus. But 
the goddess smiled bitterly, and said to her, " Well 
know I who was the author of this thing also. I 
will make further trial of thy discretion, and the 
boldness of thy heart. Seest thou the utmost peak 
of yonder steep mountain. The dark stream w^hich 
flows down thence waters th^ Stygian fields, and 



76 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

swells the stream of Cocytus. Bring me now, in 
this little urn, a draught from its innermost source.'^ 
And therewith she put into her hands a vessel of 
wrought crystal. 

And Psyche set forth in haste on her way to the 
mountain, looking there at last to find the end of 
her hapless life. But when she came to the region 
which borders on the cliff pointed out to her, she 
understood the deadly nature of her task. From a 
great rock, steep and slippery, a horrible river of 
water poured forth, falling straightway dow^n a 
channel exceeding narrow into the unseen gulf be- 
low. And lo ! creeping from the rocks on either 
hand, angry serpents, with their long necks and 
sleepless eyes. The very waters found a voice and 
bade her depart, in smothei'ed cries of. Depart hence I 
and What doest thou here f Look around thee ! and 
Destruction Ir upon thee ! And then sense left her, 
in the immensity of her peril, as one changed to stone. 

But not even then did the distress of that inno- 
cent soul escape the steady eyes of a gentle provi- 
dence. For the bird of Jupiter spread his wings and 
took flight to her, and asked her, '• Didst thou think, 
simple one, even thou ! that thou couldst steal one 
drop of that relentless stieam, the most holy river 
of Styx, terrible even to the gods ? But give me 
thine urn." And the bird took the urn, and filled it 
at the source, and returned to her quickly from 
among the teeth of the serpents, bringing with him 
of the waters, all unwilling — nay ! warning him to 
depart aAvay and not molest them. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 77 

And she, receiving the urn with great joy, ran 
back quickly that she might deliver it to Yenus, and 
yet again satisfied not the angry goddess. *' My 
child ! " she said, " in this one thing further must 
thou serve me. Take now this tiny casket, and get 
thee down even unto hell, and deliver it to Proser- 
pine. Tell her that Vacuus would have of her beauty, 
so much at least as may suffice for but one day's use ; 
that beauty she possessed ere while being fore worn 
and spoiled, through her tendance upon the sick-bed 
of her son; and be not slow in returning." 

And Psyche perceived there the last ebbing of her 
fortune — that she was now thrust openly upon 
death, who must go down, of her own motion, to 
Hades and the Shades. And straightw^ay she climbed 
to the top of an exceeding high tower, thinking 
within herself, " I will cast myself down thence; so 
shall I descend most quickly into the kingdom of the 
dead." And the tower, again, broke forth into 
speech : " Wretched Maid ! Wretched Maid ! Wilt 
thou destroy thyself ? If the breath quit thy body, 
then wilt thou indeed go down into Hades, but by 
no means return hither. Listen to me. Among the 
pathless wilds not far from this place, lies a certain 
mountain, and therein one of hell's vent-holes. 
Through the yawning breach a rough w^ay lies open, 
following which thou wilt come, by direct course, to 
the castle of Orcus. And thou must not go empty- 
handed. Take in each hand a morsel of barley- 
bread, soakod in hydromel ; and in thy mouth two 
pieces of monev, And when t-hou shalt be now well 



78 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

onward in the Avay of death, thou wilt overtake a 
lame ass laden with wood, and a lame driver, who 
will bee thee to reach him certain cords to fasten 
the burden which is falling from the ass ; but be thou 
cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as thou 
comest to the river of the dead, Charon, in that crazy 
bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further 
side. There is greed even among the dead : and 
thou shalt deliver to him, for the ferrying, one of 
those two pieces of money, in such wise that betake 
it with his hand from between thy lips. And as 
thou passest over the stream, a dead old man, rising 
on the water, will put up to thee his moldering 
hands, and pray thee to draw him into the ferry 
boat. But beware that thou yield not to unlawful 
pity. 

"When thou hast crossed, and art upon the cause- 
way, certain aged women, spinning, will cry to thee 
to lend thy hand to their work : and beware again 
that thou take no part therein ; for this also is the 
snare of Venus, whereby she would cause thee to 
cast away one at least of those cakes thou bearest 
in thy hands. And think not that a slight matter ; 
for the loss of either one of them will be to thee the 
losing of the light of day. For a watch-dog exceed- 
ing fierce lies ever before the threshold of that lonely 
house of Proserpine. Close his mouth with one of 
thy cakes ; so shalt thou pass by him, and enter 
straightway into the presence of Proserpine herself. 
Then, do thou deliver thy message, and taking what 
she shall give thee, return back again ; offering to 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 79 

the watcb-dog the (jther cake, and to the ferryman 
that other piece of money thou holdest in thy mouth. 
After this manner mayest thou return again beneath 
the stars. But withal, 1 charge thee, think not to 
look into, nor open, the casket thou bearest, with 
that treasui'e of the beaut v of the divine countenance 
hidden therein." 

So spake the stones of the tow^er ; and Psyche 
delayed not, but proceeding diligently after the 
manner enjoined, entered into the house of Proser- 
pine, at whose feet she sat down humbl\% and would 
neither the delicate couch nor that divine food which 
the goddess offered her, but did straightway the 
business of Venus. And Proserpine filled the casket 
secretly, and shut the lid, and delivered it to Psyche, 
who fled therewith from Hades with new strength. 
But coming back into the light of day, even as she 
hasted now to the ending of her service, she was 
seized by a rash curiosity. '^ Lo ! now," she said 
within herself, " my simpleness ! who bearing in my 
hands the divine loveliness, heed not to touch myself 
with a particle at least therefrom, that 1 may please 
the more by the favor of it my fair one, my beloved." 
Even as she spoke, she lifted the lid ; and behold ! 
within, neither beauty, nor anything beside, save 
sleep only, the sleep of the dead, which took hold 
upon her, filling all her members with its drowsy 
vapor, so that she lay down in the way and moved 
not, as in the slumber of death. 

And Cupid, his w^ound being now healed, because 
he would endure no longer the absence of her he 



80 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

loved, gliding through the narrow window of the 
chamber wherein he was holden, his pinions being 
now repaired with a little rest, fled forth swiftly upon 
them ; and coming to the place w^here Psyche was, 
shook that sleep awav from her, and set him in his 
prison again, awaking her with the innocent point of 
his arrow." "Lo! now, thine old error again," he 
said to her, " which had like once more to have des- 
troyed thee ! But do thou now what is lacking of 
the command of my mother ; the rest shall be my 
care.-' With these words, the lover rose upon the 
air ; and being consumed inwardly with the great- 
ness of his love, penetrated with vehement wing into 
the highest place of heaven, to la>^ his cause before 
the father of the gods. And the father of gods 
took his hand in his, and kissed his face, and said to 
him, " At no time, my son, hast thou regarded me 
with due honor. Often hast thou vexed m}^ bosom, 
wherein lies the disposition of the stars, with those 
busy darts of thine. Nevertheless, because thou 
hast grown up between these mine hands, I will ac- 
complish thy desire." And straightway he bade 
Mercury to call the gods together ; and, the council- 
chamber being filled, sitting upon a high throne, 
" Ye gods," he said, " all ye whose names are in the 
white book of the Muses, ye know yonder lad. It 
seems good to me that his youthful heats should by 
some means be restrained. And that all occasion 
may be taken from him, I would even confine him in 
the bonds of marriage. He has chosen and embraced 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 81 

a mortal maiden. Let him have fruit of her love, 
and possess her forever." 

And thereupon he bade Mercury produce Psyche 
in heaven ; and holding out to her his ambrosial cup, 
*' Take it," he said, *' and live forever : nor shall 
Cupid ever depart from thee." And the gods sat 
down together to the marriag-e-feast. On the first 
couch lay the bridegroom, and Psyche in his bosom. 
His rustic serving-boy bare the Avine to Jupiter ; and 
Bacchus to the rest. The Seasons crimsoned all 
things with their roses. Apollo sang to the lyre, 
while a little Pan prattled on his reeds, and Yenus 
danced very sweetly to the soft music. Thus, with 
due rites, did Psyche pass into the power of Cupid ; 
and from them was born the daughter whom men 
call Voluptas. 



CHAPTEE YI. 

EUPHUISM. 

So the famous story composed itself in the memory 
of Marius, with an expression changed in some ways 
from the original and on the whole graver. The 
petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius had become some- 
thing more like that " Lord, of terrible aspect," who 
stood at Dante's bedside and wept ; or at least he 
had grown to the manly earnestness of the so-called 
Eros of Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser 
matter of the book, this episode of Cupid and Psyche 
served to combine many lines of meditation, 
already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a per- 
fect imaginative love, centered upon a type of beauty 
entirely flawless and clean — an ideal which never 
wholly faded out of his thoughts, though he valued 
it at various times indifferent degrees. The human 
body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all 
beauty in material objects, seemed to him just then 
to be matter no longer ; but, having taken celestial 
fire, to assert itself as indeed the true, though visi- 
ble, soul or spirit in things. In contrast with that 
ideal, in all the pure brilliancy and, as it were, in the 
happy light of youth and morning and the spring- 
tide, men's real loves, with which at many points 



^\ 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 83 

the book brings one into close contact, appeared to 
him, like the actual tenor of their lives for the most 
part, somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddenness 
of perfect things ; a shrinking delicacy and mys- 
ticism of sentiment of the kind so well expressed in 
Psyche's tremulous hope concerning the child to be 
born of the husband she has never yet seen — in the 
face of this little child, at the least, shall I apprehend 
thine — in hoc saltern parvulo cognoscamfaciem. tuam ^ 
the fatality w^hich seems to haunt any signal beauty, 
whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself 
something illicit and isolating; the suspicion and 
hatred it so often excites in the vulgar — these were 
some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a con- 
stant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan sentiment, 
from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old 
stor}*- enforced on him. A book, like a person, has 
its fortunes with one ; is lucky or unlucky in the 
precise moment of its falling in our way, and often 
by some happy accident ranks with us for something 
more than its independent value. The Metamor- 
plioses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, 
figured for him as indeed The golden hook ; he felt a 
sort of personal gratitude to its writer, and saw in 
it doubtless far more than was really there for any 
other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in 
his remembrance, never quite losing its power in 
repeated returns to it for the revival of that first 
glowing impression. 

Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practi- 
cal one: it stimulated the literary ambition, already 



S4 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

SO strong a motive with him, by a signal example 
of success, and made him more than ever an ardent, 
indefatigable student of words, of the means or in- 
strument of the literary art. The secrets of utterance, 
of expression itself, of that through which alone 
any intellectual or spiritual power within one can 
actually take effect upon others, to over-awe or 
charm them to one's side, presented themselves to 
this ambitious lad in immediate connection Avith that 
same desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of 
which another might have relied on the acquisition 
and display of brilliant military qualities. In him. 
a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact value and 
power of words was connate with the eager longing 
for sway over others. He saw himself already a 
gallant and effective leader, innovating or conserv- 
ative as occasion might require, in the rehabilitation 
of the mother tongue, then fallen so tarnished and 
languid ; yet the sole object, as he mused within 
himself, of the only sort of patriotic feeling proper, 
or possible, for one born of slaves. The popular 
speech was gradually departing from the form and 
rule of literary language, a language always and 
increasingly somewhat artificial. While the learned 
dialect was vearlv becomins^ more and more bar- 
barously pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other 
hand, offered a thousand chance-tost gems of racy 
or picturesque expression, rejected or at least un- 
gathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. 
The time was coming when neither the pedants nor 
the people would really understand Cirero : though 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN'. 85 

there were some indeed, like this new writer Apule- 
ius, wh6, departing from the custom of writing in 
Greek, which had been a fashionable affectation 
among the sprightlier wits since the days of Ha-, 
drian, had written in the vernacular. 

The literary program which Flavian had already 
designed for himself would be a work, then, partly 
conservative or reactionary, in its dealing with the 
instrument of the literary art ; partly popular and 
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights 
of the proletariate of speech. More than fifty years 
before, the younger Pliny, himself an effective wit- 
ness for the delicate power of the Latin tongue, had 
said, " I am one of those who admire the ancients, 
yet 1 do not, like some others, underrate certain 
instances of genius which our own times afford. 
For it is not true that nature, as if weary and effete, 
no longer produces what is admirable." And he, 
Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the 
opportunity thus indicated. In his desire for a not 
too distant fame, he dreamed over all that, as the 
young Csesar may have dreamed of campaigns. 
Others might brutalize or neglect the native speech, 
that true "open field" for charm and sway over 
men : — he would make of it a serious study, weigh- 
ing the precise power of every phrase and word, 
as though it were precious metal, going back to the 
original and native sense of each, disentangling its 
later associations, restoring to full significance all its 
wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving or 
replacing its outworn or tarnished images. Latin 



SQ MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

literature and the Latin tongue were dving of routine 
and languor ; and what was necessar\% first of all, 
was to re-establish the natural and direct relation- 
•ship between thought and expression, between the 
sensation and the term ; and restore to words their 
primitive power. 

For words, after all, words manipulated with all 
his delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war 
for himself. To be forcibly impressed, in the first 
place ; and in the second, to find means of making 
visible to others that which was vividly apparent, 
delightful, of lively interest to himself, to the exclu- 
sion of all that was but middling, tame, or but half- 
true even to him— this scrupulousness of literary art 
actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a*^ sort 
of chivalrous conscience. What care for style! 
what patience of execution ! what research for the 
significant tones of ancient idiom — sonantia verba et 
antiqua! What stately and regular word- building 
—gravis et decora constructio ! He felt the whole 
meaning of the skeptical Pliny's somewhat melan- 
choly advice- to one of his friends—to seek in litera^ 
ture deliverance from mortality— 7/,?5 stitdiis se litera- 
Tum a raortalitate mndicet. And there was everv 
thing in the nature and the training of Marius to 
make him a full participator in the hopes of such a 
new literary school, with Flavian for its leader. In 
those refinements of his curious spirit, in that horror 
of profanities, in that fastidious sense of a correct- 
ness in external form, there was something which 
ministered to the old ritual interest, still survivino- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 87 

in him ; as if here indeed were involved a kind of 
sacred service to the mother-tongue. 

It was the principle of Euphuism, as manifested 
in every age in which the literary conscience has 
been awakened to forgotten duties towards lan- 
guage, towards the instruments of expression ; and 
in reality does but modify a little the principles of 
all effective expression at all times. 'Tis art's func- 
tion to conceal itself : ars est celare artem—\s> a say- 
ing, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has 
perhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted 
by those who have had little literary or other art to 
conceal ; and from the very beginning of professional 
literature, the " labor of the file "—a labor in the 
case of Plato, for instance, or Yirgil, like that of the 
oldest of goldsmiths as described by Apuleius, en- 
riching the work by far more than the weight of 
the precious metal it removed— has always had its 
function. Sometimes, of course, as in later examples 
of it, this Koman Euphuism, with its determination 
at any cost to aim at beauty in writing— 1\- xd)lo? 
^/)a^££v— lapsed into its characteristic fopperies or 
mannerisms, really the mere " defects of its qualities," 
indeed ; not wholly unpleasing perhaps, or at least 
excusable, when looked at as but the toys— as Cicero 
called them— the strictly congenial and appropriate 
toys— of an assiduously cultivated age, which could 
not help being polite, critical, self-conscious. A 
mere love of novelty also had doubtless its part 
there ^, as with the Euphuism of the Elizabethan 
age, and of the modern French romanticists, its 



88 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

neologies formed the subject of one of the cnarges 
against it ; though indeed, as regards these tricks of 
taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint family 
likeness rather, between the Euphuists of successive 
ages. Here, as elsewhere, the power of " fashion," 
as it is called, is but one minor form, slight enough 
it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper 
yearning of human nature towards an ideal perfec- 
tion, which is a continuous force in it ; and since 
here too human nature is limited, such fashions must 
necessarily reproduce themselves. Among other re- 
semblances to later growths of Euphuism, its archa- 
isms on the one hand, and its neologies on the other, 
the Euphuism of the days of Marcus Aurelius had, 
in the composition of verse, its fancy for the refrain. 
It was a snatch from a popular chorus, something 
he had heard sounding all over the town of Pisa one 
April night, one of the first bland and summer-like 
nights of the year, that Flavian had chosen for the 
refrain of a poem he was then pondering — the Per- 
vigilium Veneris — the vigil, or " nocturn " of 
Yenus. 

Certain elderly counselors, filling what is a con- 
stant part in the little tragi-comedy which literature 
and its votaries are playing in all ages, would ask, sus- 
pecting some unreality or affectation in that minute 
culture of form : — Cannot those who have anything 
to say, say it directly ? Why not be broad and simple, 
like the old writers of Greece ? And that challenge 
at least set his thoughts at work on the intellectual 
situation, as it lay between the children of the present 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 89 

and those earliest masters. Certainly, the most 
wonderful, the unique point, about the Greek genius, 
in literature as in everything else, had been the utter 
absence of imitation in its productions. How had 
the burden of precedent, laid upon every artist, in- 
creased since then ! It was all around one — that 
smoothly built world of old classical taste, an accom- 
plished fact, with an overwhelming authority on 
every point of the conduct of one's work. With no 
fardel on its own back, yet so imperious to those who 
labored after it, Hellas^ in its early freshness, looked 
as distant from him even then, as it does from our- 
selves. There might seem to be no place left for 
novelty or originality ; place only for a patient, in- 
finite faultlessness. On this point too Flavian passed 
through a world of curious art-casuistries and even 
self-tormentings, at the threshold of his work. Was 
poetic beauty a thing ever one and the same, and 
an absolute type ; or, changing always with the soul 
of time itself, did it depend upon the taste, the 
peculiar trick of apprehension, the fashion, as we 
say, of every successive age ? Might one recover the 
earlier manner and sense of it, by a masterly effort 
to recall all the complexities of the life, moral and 
intellectual, of an earlier age ? Had there been 
really bad ages in art and literature ? Were all ages 
— even those earliest, adventurous, matutinal days — 
in themselves equally poetical or unpoetical ; and 
poetry, the literar\^ beauty, the poetic ideal, always 
but a borrowed light upon men's actual life ? 



90 MARIUS THE EPICUREAK. 

Homer had said — 

or 6' bre 6r) ?u/iivoc rro/ly/Jev^fOf tvrbc I/covro, 
lor la fiEv crdAavro^ dtaav 6" kv vifi /it?Miv^ .... 
K 6£ Kal a'vTul paivov irrl pijYiuvt daTidaarjq. 

And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just 
thus! Homer was always telling things in this 
manner. And one might think there had been no 
effort there ; that it was but the almost mechanical 
transcript of a time intrinsically and naturally poetic 
in itself, in which one could hardly have spoken at 
all without ideal effect, or the sailors have pulled 
down their boat without making a picture in " the 
great style," against a sky charged with marvels. 
Must not an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for 
more than half of the whole work ? Or might the 
closer reader discover even here, even in Homer, a 
really mediatorial function of the poet between the 
reader and the actual matter of his experience ; the 
poet waiting, as it were, in an age which really felt 
itself trite and commonplace enough, on his oppor- 
tunity for the touch of " golden alchemy," or at least 
for the lighted side of the things themselves ? Might 
not another, in one's own prosaic and used-up time, 
so unev^entful as it had been through the long reign 
of those quiet Antonines, in like manner, discover 
his ideal, by a due waiting upon it ? Would not a 
generation to come, looking back upon this, under 
the power of the enchanted-distance fallacy, find 
it ideal to view, in contrast with its own languor-— 
the languor that for some reason (concerning which 



MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN. 91 

Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to 
haunt men always? Had Homer, even, appeared 
unreal and affected in bis poetic flight, to some of 
the people of his day ; as seemed to happen with 
every new literature in turn ? In any case, the in- 
tellectual conditions of early Greece had been — how 
different from these ! — and a true literary tact Avould 
accept that difference, in forming the primary con- 
ception of the literary function, in a later time. 
Perhaps the utmost one could get by conscious effort, 
in the way of a reaction or return to the conditions 
of an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas — 
artificial artlessness — naivete ; and that quality too 
might have its measure of euphuistic charm, direct 
and sensible enough ; though it must count, in com- 
parison with the genuine early Greek newness at 
the beginning, not as the freshness of the open 
fields, but only of a bunch of field-flowers in a heated 
room. 

Meantime, there was all this : on the one side, the 
pagan world — for us but a fragment, for him an 
accomplished but present fact ; still a living, united, 
organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its religions, 
its thoughts, its sagacious forms of polity ; that so 
weighty authority it exercised on every point, being, 
really, only the measure of its charm for every one 
— on the other side, the actual world in all its ardent 
self-assertion : and Flavian himself, with all his 
abounding animation, there, in the midst of the sit- 
uation. From the natural defects, the littlenesses 
which may appear connate with the euphuistic 



92 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

scheme which just then so stront^ly influenced him, 
he was saved by the consciousness that he had a 
matter to present, very real, at least to himself. 
His dilettanteism, his assiduous preoccupation with 
what might seem but the details of mere form or 
manner, was, after all, bent upon the function of 
bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their in- 
tegrity, certain strong personal intuitions, certain 
visions or apprehensions of things as being, with 
important results, in this way rather than in that — 
apprehensions which the artistic or literary expres- 
sion was called upon to follow, with the exactness 
of wax or clay, clothing the model within it. Flavian 
too, with his fine, clear mastery of the practically 
effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as 
axiomatic in literature — That to know when one's 
self is interested, is the rirst condition of interesting 
other people. It was a principle, the forcible ap- 
prehension of which made him jealous and fastidious 
in the selection of his intellectual food ; often listless 
while others read or gazed diligently ; never pre- 
tending to be moved out of mere complaisance to 
other people's emotions : it served to foster in him 
a very scrupulous literary sincerity with himself. 
And it was that uncompromising demand for a mat- 
ter in all art, of immediate derivation from lively 
personal intuition, that constant appeal to individual 
judgment, which kept his Euphuism, at its weakest, 
from sinking into a mere artifice. 

Was the magnificent exordi%iin of Lucretius, ad- 
dressed to the goddess Yenus, the work of his earlier 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 93 

manhood, and designed originally to open an argu- 
ment less persistently somber than that protest 
against the whole pagan heaven which actually fol- 
lows it ? Certainly it is the most t3q)ical expression 
of a mood, which still, with little modification comes 
over the young poet, and as something peculiar to 
his vouth, when he feels the sentimental current set 
so forcibly through his veins, and so much as a 
matter of purely physical excitement, that he can 
hardly distinguish it from the animation of external 
nature, the up-swelling of the seed in the earth, and 
of the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, 
again, as to his later euphuistic kinsmen, old mythol- 
ogy seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives 
and interests as human life itself, had long been 
occupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal 
principle of life in things ; a composition shaping 
itself, little by little, out of a thousand dim percep- 
tions, into singularly definite form (definite and firm 
as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I 
said, he had caught his *' refrain," from the lips of 
the 3'oung men singing, because they could not help 
it, in the streets of Pisa. And as it oftenest happens 
also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those 
piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious 
completeness among the fortunate incidents, the 
physical heat and light, and one singular!}^ ti^PPy 
day. 

It was one of the first hot days of March — the 
sacred day — on which from Pisa, as from many 
another harbor on the Mediterranean, the Ship of 



94: MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Isis went to sea, and every one walked down to the 
shore-side to witness the freighting and launching 
of the vessel, and its final abandonment by the 
mariners among the Avaves, as an object really 
devoted to the great goddess; the new rival or 
double of ancient Yenus, and like her a favorite 
patroness of sailors. On the preceding night, all 
the world had been abroad to view the illumination 
of the river ; the stately lines of houses on its shores 
being festooned with hundreds of many-colored 
lamps. The young men had been pouring out their 
chorus — 

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit 
Quique amavit cras amet — ■ 

as they carried their torches through the yielding 
crowd, or rowed their lanterned boats up and down 
the stream till far into the night, when heavy rain- 
drops had driven all lingerers within doors. Morn. 
ing broke, however, smiling and serene ; and the 
great procession started betimes. The slightly 
curving river, with the smoothly paved streets on 
either side of it, between the low marble parapet 
and the fair dwelling houses, formed together the 
main highway of the city; and the pageant, accom- 
panied throughout by innumerable lanterns and wax 
tapers, took its course up one of these streets (cross- 
ing the water b}' a bridge, up-stream) and down the 
other, to the haven ; every possible standing-place, 
out of doors and within, being crowded with 
^ight-seers, of whom Jtlarius was one of the most 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 95 

eager, deeply interested in finding the spectacle 
much as Apuleius had described it in his book, 
though on a scale less grand. 

First of all, the master of ceremonies and his 
marshals, quietly waving back the crowd, made way 
for a number of women, who scattered flowers and 
perfumes. They were followed by a company of 
musicians, twanging and piping, on instruments the 
strangest Marius had ever beheld, the notes of a 
hymn, narrating the first origin of this votive cere- 
monv, to a choir of white- vested youths, who marched 
behind them singing it. The tire-women and other 
personal attendants of the great goddess came next, 
bearing the instruments of their ministry, and 
various articles of her attire, wrought in tlie most 
precious material ; some of them with long ivory 
oombs, plying their hands and decking tlieir hair, in 
wild yet graceful concert of movement, as they 
went, in sacred mimicry of her toilet. Placed in 
their rear were the mirror-bearers of the goddess, 
carrying large mirrors of beaten brass or silver, 
turned in such a way as to reflect to the great body 
of worshipers, who immediately followed them, 
the face of the sacred image, as it advanced on its 
way ; and their faces to it, as though they were really 
coming to meet the divine presence. They com- 
prehended a multitude of both sexes and all ages, 
who had been initiated into the divine mysteries, 
clad in fair linen ; the females veiled, the males 
with shining tonsures ; every one carrying a sistrum^ 
the richer sort of silver, a few ^ery dainty persons 



96 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

of fine gold, rattling the reeds as the}^ proceeded, 
with a noise like the jargon of innumerable insects 
and chattering birds, just awakened out of torpor 
and come abroad in the spring sun. Then, borne 
upon a kind of platform, came the goddess herself, 
swaying up and down above the heads of the multi- 
tude as the bearers walked, in her mystic robe 
embroidered with the moon and stars, bordered 
gracefully with a fringe of real fruit and flowers, 
and with a glittering crown upon her head. The 
train of the procession consisted of the priests in 
long white vestments, close from head to foot, and 
composed into groups ; each of which bore exposed 
aloft one of the sacred symbols of Isis — the corn- 
fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of Equity — and 
among them Marius saw the votive ship itself, 
carved and gilt, and adorned bravely with flags fly- 
ing. Last of all walked the high priest ; the people 
kneeling as he passed, to kiss his hand, in which he 
carried those well-remembered roses. 

Marius followed with the rest to the harbor, 
where the ship, lowered from the shoulders of the 
priests, was loaded with as much as it could carr\^ of 
the rich spices and other costly gifts, offered in great 
profusion by the worshipers. And so, launched at 
last upon the water, the mystic vessel left the shore ; 
crossing the harbor-bar in the wake of a mucii 
stouter vessel than itself, manned by a crew of white- 
robed mariners, whose function it was, at the 
appointed moment, finally to desert it on the open 
sea. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 97 

The remainder of the day was spent by most in 
parties on the water ; and Marius and Flavian sailed 
further than they had ever done before to a wild 
spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek 
colony, which, having had its eager, stirring life in 
the days when Etruria was still a power in Italy, 
had perished in the time of the civil wars. In the 
absolutetransparency of the air on this gracious day, 
an infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached 
the eye with sparkling clearness, as the two lads 
sped rapidly over the waves — Flavian at work sud- 
denly, from time to time, with his tablets. They 
reached land at last. The coral-fishers had spread 
their nets on the sands, with a tumble-down of 
quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine 
of Yenus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and 
napkins and gilded shells, which these people had 
offered to the image. Flavian and Marius sat down 
under the shade of a mass of gray rock or ruin, 
where had been the sea-gate of the Greek town, and 
talked of life in those old Greek colonies. Of this 
place, all that remained, besides those rude stones, 
was — a handful of silver coins, each with a head of 
pure and archaic beauty, though a little cruel, sup- 
posed to represent the Siren Ligeia, whose tomb was 
formerly shown here — only those — and a song ; the 
very strain which Flavian had caught back in those 
last months. They were records which spoke, 
certainlv, of the charm of life Avithin those walls. 
How strong must have been the tide of men's ex- 
istence in that little old republican town, so small 



98 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

that this circle of gray stones, of service now only 
by the moisture they gathered for the blue-flowering 
gentians among them, had been the line of its ram- 
part ; yet concentrating within it an epitome of alj 
that was liveliest, most animated and adventurous, in 
the old Greek people of which it was a graft ; and 
enhancing it, by concentration of all its many motives 
into smaller space. The band of " devoted youth " — 
Upd veony? — of the youugcr brothers, devoted to the 
gods and whatever luck they might afford, because 
there was no room for them at home — went forth, 
bearing the sacred flame from the mother-hearth ; 
itself a flame, of power to consume the whole 
material of existence in clear heat and light, and 
leave no smoldering residue. The life of those 
vanished townsmen, so brilliant and revolutionary, 
applying so abundantly the personal qualities which 
alone just then Marius seemed to value, associated 
itself with the actual figure of his companion, stand- 
ing there before him, his face enthusiastic with the 
sudden thought of all that ; and struck him vividly 
as what would have been precisely the fitting oppor- 
tunity for a nature like his, so hungry for control, ^/ 
for personal ascendency, over men. 

Marius noticed also, however, as high spirits flagged 
at last, on the way home through the heavy dew of 
the evening, more than physical fatigue, as he 
thought, in Flavian, who seemed to find no refresh- 
ment in the coolness. There had been something 
feverish, perhaps, and like the beginning of sickness, 
about his almost forced gayety, in this sudden heat 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 99 

of spring ; and by the evening of the next day he 
was lying with a burning spot on his forehead, 
stricken, as was thought from the first, by the ter- 
rible new disease. 



CHAPTER YIl. 

PAGAN DEATH. 

For the fantastical colleague of the philosophic 
emperor Marcus Aurelius, returning in triumph from 
the East, had brought in his train, among the enemies 
of Rome, one by no means a captive. People 
t^ctuallv sickened, stricken bv a sudden touch of the 
unsuspected foe, as they watched in dense crowds 
the grotesque or pathetic imagery of failure and suc- 
cess, in the triumphal procession. And as usual, 
the plague brought with it a power to develop all 
pre-existent germs of superstition. It was through 
a dishonor done to Apollo himself — said popular 
rumor — to Apollo, the old titular divinity of pesti- 
lence, that the poisonous thing had come abroad. 
Pent up in a golden coffer, consecrated to the god, 
it had escaped in the sacrilegious plundering of his 
temple at Seleucia by Terus's soldiers, after a traitor- 
ous surprise of that town and a cruel massacre. 
Certainly there was something which baffled all 
imaginable precautions, and all medical science, in 
the suddenness with which the disease broke out 
simultaneously, here and there, among both soldiers 
and citizens, even in places far remote from the main 
line of its grand march, in the rear of the victorious 

armv. It seemed to have invaded the whole empire. 
100 



MARIU8 THE EPICUREAN. 101 

And some have even thought that, in a mitigated 
form, it permanently remained there. In Kome 
itself many thousands perished ; and old authorities 
tell of farm-steads, whole towns, and even entire 
neighborhoods, which from that time continued 
without inhabitants and lapsed into wildness or ruin. 
Flavian lay at the open window of his lodging, 
with a burning pain in the head, fancying no cover- 
ing light and thin enough to be applied to his body. 
His head being relieved after a time, there was 
distress at the chest. It was but the fatal course of 
the strange new sickness, under many disguises ; 
traveling from the brain to the feet, like a material 
resident, weakening one after another of the organic 
centers ; often, when it did not kill, depositing 
various degrees of life-long infirmity in this member 
or that ; and after that descent, returning upwards 
again, now as a mortal coldness, leaving the en- 
trenchments of the fortress of life overturned, one 
by one, behind it. 

Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast 
now in a painful cough, but relieved from that 
burnino- fever in the brain, amid the rich-scented 
flowers— rare Pa^stum roses, and the like— procured 
by Marius for his solace, in a fancied convalescence; 
and would, at intervals, return to work at his verses, 
with a great eagerness to complete and transcribe 
the poem, while Marius sat and wrote at his dicta- 
tion, one of the latest but not the poorest specimens 
of genuine Latin poetry. 

It was in truth a kind of nuptial hymn, which, 



102 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

taking its start from the tiiought of nature as the 
universal mother, celebrated the preliminary pair- 
ing, and mating together, of all fresh things, in the 
hot and genial spring-time — the immemorial nuptials 
of the soul of spring itself and the brown earth ; 
and was full of a delighted, mystic sense of what 
passed between them in that fantastic marriage. 
And its mystic burden was relieved, at intervals, 
by the familiar playfulness of the Latin verse-writer 
dealing with mythology, which, coming at so late a 
day, had still a wonderful freshness in its old age — • 
" Amor has put his weapons by and will keep holiday. 
He has been bidden to go unclad, that none may be 
wounded by his bow and arrows. But take care ! 
In truth he is none the less armed than usual, though 
he be all unclad." 

In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while 
making it his chief aim to retain the opulent, many- 
s^^llabled vocabulary of the Latin genius, at some 
points even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipa- 
tion of wholly new laws of taste as reo^ards sound — 
of a new range of sound itself ; the note of which, 
associating itself with certain other fancies or ex- 
periences of his, was to Marius like the foretaste of 
an entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come. 
Flavian had caught, in fact, something of the 
rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music of the 
medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its 
unction and raysticity of spirit. There was in his 
work, along with the last splendor of the classical 
language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that trans* 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 103 

formed life it was to have in the rhyming middle 
age, just about to dawn. The impression thus 
forced upon Marius connected itself with a feeling, 
the precise inverse of that, known to every one, 
which seems to say — You have heen just here, just 
thus, hefore! — a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent 
but prescient, which passed over him many times 
afterwards, coming across certain people and places ; 
as if he detected there the process of actual change 
to a wholly undreamed of and renewed condition of 
human body and soul. It was as if he saw the 
heavy, yet decrepit old Koman architecture about 
him, rebuilding on an intrinsically better pattern. — 
Could it have been actually on a new musical in- 
strument that Flavian had first heard those novel 
accents of his verse ? And still Marius noticed there, 
amid all that richness of impression and imagery, 
the firmness of outline he had always relished so 
much, in the composition of Flavian — Yes ! a firm- 
ness like that of some master of noble metal-work, 
manipulating tenacious bronze or gold. Even then, 
the haunting refrain, with its im.promjptu variations, 
from the throats of those strong young men, floated 
in at the window. 

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit ! 
Quique amavit eras amet ! 

—repeated Flavian, tremulously dictating yet one 
stanza more. 

What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and a 
body so fortunately endowed, the mere liberty of 



104 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Jife itself above-ground, " those sunny mornings in 
the cornfields, bv the sea," as he recollected them 
one day, when the window was thrown open upon 
the early freshness — his sense of all that, was from 
the first very sharp and clear, yet still rather as of 
something he was but deprived of for a time than 
finally bidding farewell to. That was while he was 
still with no very grave misgiving as to the issue of 
his sickness, and felt the sources of life still springing 
essentially unadulterate within him. From time to 
time, indeed, Marius, working eagerlv at the poem 
from his dictation, was haunted by a feeling of the 
triviality of such work just then. The recurrent 
sense of some obscure dano'er bevond the mere 
danger of death, vaguer than that and by so much 
the more terrible, like the menace of some shadowy 
adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack 
they were unacquainted, confused him now and 
aofain, throuo^h those hours of excited attention to 
his manuscript, and to the merely physical wants of 
Flavian. Still, for those three days there was much 
hope and cheerfulness, and even jesting. Half- 
consciously Marius tried to prolong one or another 
relieving circumstance of the day, the preparations 
for rest and for morning refreshment, for instance ; 
somewhat sadly making the most of the little luxury 
of this or that, with something of the feigned cheer 
of the mother who sets her last morsels before her 
famished child as for a feast, but really that he 
*' may eat it and die." 

It was on the afternoon of the seventh dav that he 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 105 

allowed Marius finally to put the untinished manu- 
script aside. For the enemy, leaving the chest quiet 
at last, though exhausted, had made itself felt with 
full power again in a painful vomiting, which seemed 
to shake his body asunder, with great consequent 
prostration. From that time the distress increased 
rapidly downwards — omnia turn vero vitai claustra 
labahant — and soon the cold was mounting, with 
sure pace, from the dead feet to the head. 

And now Marius began more than to suspect 
what the issue must be, and henceforward could but 
watch with a sort of agonized fascination the rapid 
but systematic work of the destroyer, faintly reliev- 
ing a little the mere accidents of the sharper forms 
of the suffering. Flavian himself seemed, with full 
consciousness at last — with a clear, concentrated, 
jealous estimate of the actual crisis — to be doing 
battle with his enemy. His mind surveyed, with 
great distinctness, the various suggested modes of 
relief. He would certainly get better, he fancied, 
could he be removed to a certain place on the hills 
where as a child he had once recovered from sick- 
ness ; but found that he could scarcely raise his 
head from the pillow without giddiness. And then, 
as if now clearly foreseeing the end, he would set 
himself, with an eager effort, and with that eager 
and angry look, which is noted as one of the premo- 
nitions of death in this disease, to fashion out, with- 
out formal dictation, still a few more broken verses 
of his unfinished work, in hard-set determination, 
defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little drop at 



106 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

least, from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so 
quickly past him. 

But at length delirium — symptom that the enemy's 
work was done, and the last resort of life yielding to 
the plague — broke the coherent order of words and 
thoughts; and Marius, dwelling intently on the 
coming agony, found his best hope in the increasing 
dimness of the patient's mind. In intervals of 
clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of 
sorrow and desolation, were very painful. No longer 
battling with the disease, he seemed to be yielding 
himself, as it were, to the disposal of the victorious 
foe, and dying passiveh^, like some dumb creature, 
in hopeless acquiescence at last. That old, half 
pleading peevishness, actually unamiable, yet seem- 
ing only to need conditions of life a little happier 
than they had been, to become refinement of affec- 
tion, and a delicate grace in its demand on the sym- 
pathy of othei'S, had changed in those moments of 
full intelligence to a tremulous, clinging gentleness, 
as he lay — " on the very threshold of death" — with 
his sharply contracted hand in that of Marius, to his 
\ almost surprised happiness, winning him now to an 
absolutely self-forgetful devotion. There was a new 
sort of pleading in the misty eyes, just because they 
took such unsteady note of him, which made Marius 
feel as if guilty; anticipating a form of self-reproach 
which surprises sometimes even the tenderest minis- 
trant, when, at death, the sudden cessation of affec- 
tionate labor gives time for the suspicion of some 
failure of love, perhaps, at one or another minute 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. lOT 

point in it. Marius almost longed to take his share 
in the suffering, that he might understand so the 
better how to relieve it. 

It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the 
patient, and Marius extinguished it. The thunder 
which had sounded ail day among the hills, with a 
heat not unwelcome to Flavian, had given way at 
nightfall to steady rain ; and in the darkness Marius 
lay down beside him, faintly shivering now in the 
sudden cold, to lend him his own warmth, unde- 
terred by the fear of contagion which had kept 
other people from passing near the house. At 
length about daybreak he perceived that the last 
effort had come with a restoration of mental clear- 
ness which recognized him (Marius understood this 
in the contact, light as it was) there, beside him. 
*'Is it a comfort," he whispered then, "that I shall 
often come and weep over you ? ^' — " Not unless I 
be aware of you there, and hear you weeping! " 

The sun shone out on the people going to work 
for a lono: hot dav, and Marius was standins; bv the 
dead, watching, with the deliberate purpose of fixing 
in his memory every detail, that he might have that 
picture in reserve, should any day of forgetfulness 
ever hereafter come to him with the temptation to 
feel completely happy again. A blind feeling of 
outrage, of resentment against nature itself, mingled 
with an agony of pity, as he noted on the now 
placid features a certain touching look of humility 
almost of abjectness, like the expression of a smitten 
child or animal, as of one, fallen at last, after a- 



108 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a 
remorseless adversary. Out of mere tenderness he 
would not forget one circumstance of all that ; as a 
man might piously stamp on his memory the death- 
scene of a brother wrongfully condemned, against a 
time that may come. 

The fear of the corpse, which surprised him at 
last in his effort to watch by it at night, was a hint 
of his own failing strength, just in time. The first 
night after thew^ashing of the body, he bore stoutly 
enough the tax which affection seemed to demand, 
throwing the incense from time to time on the little 
altar placed beside the bier. It was the recurrence 
of the thing — that unchanged outline below the cov- 
erlet, amid a silence in w^hich the faintest rustle 
seemed to speak — that finally overcame his deter- 
mination. Surely here, in this alienation, in this 
sense of distance between them, which had come 
over him before in a minor degree when the mind 
of Flavian had wandered in his sickness, was another 
of the pains of death. Yet he was able to make all 
due preparations, and go through the ceremonies, 
shortened a little because of the infection, when, on 
a cloudless evening, the funeral procession went 
forth ; himself, when the flames of the pyre had 
done their work, carrying away the urn of the de- 
ceased, in the folds of his toga, to its last resting- 
place in the cemetery beside the highway — 

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus 
Tam cari capitis? — 

and so turning home to sleep in his own lonely 
lod£:iniF. 



PART THE SECOND. 



CHAPTER YIII. 

ANIMULA, VAGULA, BLANDULA 
HOSPE8 COMESQLK COKPORIS, 
QUAE NUNC ABIBIS IN LOCA ? 
PALLIDULA, RIGIDA, NUDULA. 

The Emperor Hadrian to nis 8oul» 

FLAVIAN was no more. The little marble chest 
with its dust and tears lay cold among tlie faded 
flowers. For most people the actual spectacle of 
death brings out into greater reality, at least for the 
imagination, whatever confidence they may entertain 
as to the soul's survival in another life. To Marius, 
greatly agitated by that event, the earthly end of 
Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing less 
than the soul's extinction. He had gone out as 
utterly as the fire among those still beloved ashes. 
Even such wistful suspense of judgment as that 
expressed bv the dying Hadrian, regarding further 
stages of being still possible for his soul in some dim 
journey hence, seemed wholly untenable, and, with it, 
almost all that remained of the religion of his child- 
hood. Future extinction seemed just then to be what 
the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to 
On the other hand, there came a novel curiosity as to 

what the various schools of ancient philosophy had 
111 



112 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

had to say Concerning that strange, fluttering crea- 
ture ; and that curiosity impelled hiin to certain severe 
studies, in which, as before, his earlier religious con. 
science seemed still to survive, as a principle of 
hieratic scrupulousness or integrity of thought, in 
this new service to intellectual light. 

At this time, with his inward and poetic temper, he 
might have fallen a prey to the enervating mysticism 
which was then lying in wait for ardent souls, in many 
a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. 
From all tbat, attractive as it might be to one side of 
his nature, he was kept by his real virility — by some- 
thing well-braced, or cynical even — effective in him, 
among other results, as a hatred of theatricality, and 
an instinctive recognition that in vigorous intelligence 
mast be indeed the most real presence of the divine 
being. With this was connected a feeling, all the 
stronger as manhood came on, of the poetic beauty 
of mere clearness of mind — the actually aesthetic 
charm of a cold austerity of thought ; as if the 
kinship of that to the clearness of phj^sical light were 
something more than a figure of speech. Of all those 
various religious fantasies, as from enthusiasm, he 
could well appreciate the picturesque : that was made 
possible for him by a vein of Epicureanism, already 
leading him to conceive of himself as but the passive 
spectator of the world around him. But it was to 
the severer thought, of which such matters as Epi- 
curean theory are born, that, in effect, he now betook 
himself. With an instinctive suspicion of those 
mechanical arccma^ which really bring great and little 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 113 

souls to a level, for him, the only possible dilemma 
lay between the old, simple, ancestral Eoman religion, 
now become so incredible to him, and the results of 
the honest action of his own unassisted, untroubled 
intelligence. Even those arcana coelestia of the 
Platonists — all they had to say as to the essential 
indifference of pure soul to its bodily house and 
merely occasional dwelling-place — seemed to him, 
while his heart was there in the urn with the material 
ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his 
last agony, wholly unfeeling and inhuman, as tending 
to lessen his resentment at nature's wrong. It was 
to the sentiment of the body and the affections which 
it defined — the body, of whose color and force that 
wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or 
abstract — that he clung. The various pathetic traits 
of the beloved, suffering, perished body of Flavian, so 
deeply pondered, had made him a materialist, and 
with something of the humor of a devotee. 

It seemed at first as if his care for poetry had 
passed away with that, to be leplaced by the 
literature of thought. His much pondered manu- 
script verses were laid aside ; and what happened now 
to one, who was certainly to be somewhat of a poet 
from first to last, looked, at the moment, like a 
change from poetiy to prose. He came of age at 
this time, and found himself, though with beardless 
face, his own master; and at eighteen, an age at 
which, then as now, many youths of capacity, who 
fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from 
pthers chiefly in affectation and vague dreaming, he 



114 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

secluded himself indeed from others, but in a severe 
intellectual meditation, the salt of poetry, without 
which all the more serious charm is lacking to that 
imaginative world, which for him had revealed itself 
earlier in a spontaneous surrender to the dominion of 
outward impressions. Still with something of his old 
childish religious earnestness, he set himself — Sich im 
Denken zu orientiren — to determine his bearings, as 
by compass, in the world of thought — to get that 
precise acquaintance with the creative intelligence 
itself, its structure and capacities, its relation to other 
parts of himself and to other things, without which, 
certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young 
man rich in this world's goods coming of age, he must 
go into affairs and ascertain his outlook : there must 
be no disguises : an exact estimate of realities, as 
towards himself, he must have— a delicately measured 
gradation of certainty in things — from the distant, 
haunted horizon of mere imagination or surmise, to 
the actual feeling of sorrow in his lieart, as he reclined 
one morning, alone instead of in pleasant company, to 
ponder over the hard sayings of an imperfect old 
Greek manuscript, unrolled beside him. His former 
gay companions, meeting him ir the streets of the old 
Italian town, and noting the graver lines coming into 
the face of the somber but enthusiastic student of 
intellectual structure, who could hold his own so well 
in the society of accomplished older men, were half 
afraid of him, though proud to have him of their 
company. Why thus reserved ? — they asked, con- 
cerning the orderly, self-possessed youth, whose 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 115 

speech and carriage seemed so carefully measured, 
who was surely no poet like the rapt, disheveled 
Lupus. TVas he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga 
was so daintily folded, and who was always as fresh 
as the flowers he wore ; or bent on his own line of 
ambition ; or even on riches ? 

Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early 
morning for the most part, those writers, chiefly, who 
had made it their business to know what might be 
thought concerning the strange, enigmatic, personal 
essence, which had certainly seemed to go out alto- 
gether, along with the funeral fires. And the old 
Greek who more than any other was now giving form 
to his thoughts was a very hard master. From 
Epicurus, from the thunder and lightning of Lucre- 
tius — like thunder and lightning some distance off, 
which one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses 
— he had gone back to the writer who was in a 
certain sense the teacher of both, Ileraclitus of Ionia, 
whose difficult book " concerning Nature " w^as even 
then rare, for people had long since satisfied them- 
selves by quoting certain brilliant isolated oracles 
only out of what was at best a taxing kind of lore. 
But the difficulty of the early Greek prose did but 
spur the curiosity of Marius : and the writer, the 
superior clearness of whose intellectual view had so 
isolated him from other men, and who had had so 
little Joy of that superiority, was avowedly exacting 
as to the amount of devout attention he required 
from the student. " The many," he said, always 
thus emphasizing the difference between the many 



3 16 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

and the few, are ** like people heavy with wine," *' led 
by children," '* knowing not whither they go ;" and 
yet, " much learning doth not make wise ; " and again, 
"the ass, after all, would have its thistles rather than 
fine gold." 

Heraclitus indeed had been aware of the difficulty 
for " the many " of the paradox with which his 
doctrine begins, and the due reception of which must 
involve a denial of habitual impressions, as the neces- 
sary first step in the way of truth. His philosophy 
had been developed in conscious, outspoken opposition 
to the current mode of thinking, as a matter requiring 
an exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its " dry 
light." Men are subject to an illusion, he protests, 
regarding matters apparent to sense : what the uncor- 
rected sense gives being a false impression of perma- 
nence or fixity in things, which have really changed 
their nature in the very moment in which we see and 
touch them. And the radical flaw in the current 
mode of thought would lie in this — that, reflecting 
this false or unpurged sensation, it attributes to the 
phenomena of experience a durability which does not 
really belong to them. Imaging forth from those 
fleeting impressions a world of firmly outlined ob- 
jects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead 
what in reality is full of animation, of energy, of the 
fire of life — that eternal process of nature, of which 
at a later time Goethe spoke, as the " Living Gar- 
ment." through which God is seen by us, ever in 
weaving at the " Loom of Time." 

And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made 



MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN. II7 

was, in the first instance, from confused to uncon- 
fused sensation ; with a sort of prophetic seriousness, 
a great claim and assumption, which we may under- 
stand, if we anticipate in this preliminary skepti- 
cism the ulterior scope of his specuUition, according 
to which the universal motion of all natural things 
is but one particuhir stage, of measure, u\ that un- 
resisting energy in which the divine reason consists. 
The one true being — the constant subject of all early 
thought — it was his merit to hav^e conceived, not as 
a stagnant and sterile inaction, but as a perpetual 
energy, from the restless stream of which, at certain 
points, some elements detach themselves and harden 
into non-entity and death, corresponding, as outward 
objects, to man's inward condition of ignorance; 
that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with 
this paradox of a subtle, perpetual change in all 
visible things, that the high speculation of Heracli- 
tus begins. Hence that scorn he expresses for any- 
thing like a careless, half-conscious, " use-and-wont" 
reception of our experience, which took so strong a 
hold on men's memories ! Hence th.>se n^any pre- 
cepts towards a strenuous self-conscicusness in aU we 
think and do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, 
which makes strict attentiveness of mind a kind of 
religious duty and service. 

The merely skeptical doctrine, then, that the seem- 
ingly fixed objects of our ordinary experience are 
reaiiv in pernetual chang-e, had been, as orimnallv 
conceived, but the preliminary step toward a great 
system of almost religious philosophy. Then as 



118 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

now, the philosophic and illuminated mind might 
apprehend, in what seemed a mass of lifeless matter, 
the movement of the universal life, in which things, 
and men's impressions of them, were ever *' coming 
to be," alternately consumed and renewed. That 
perpetual change, which an attentive understanding 
could discover where common opinion found fixed 
objects, was but the sign of a subtler but more uni- 
versal motion — the sustained, unsleeping, forward- 
pushing vitality — of the divine reason itself, ever 
proceeding by its own rhythmical logic, and lending 
to all mind and matter, in turn, what life they had. 
In this " perpetual flux " of minds and things, there 
was, as Heraclitus conceived, a continuance, if not 
of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly 
intelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical 
notes, wrought out in and through the series of their 
mutations — ordinances of the divine reason, main- 
tained throughout the changes of the phenomenal 
world : and this harmony in their mutation and op- 
position, was a principle of sanity and reality in 
things. But it had happened, that, of all this, the 
first, merely skeptical step, that easiest step on the 
threshold, had alone remained in general memory ; 
and the " doctrine of motion " seemed to those who 
had felt its seduction to make all fixed knowledge 
impossible. The swift passage of things, the still 
swifter passage of those modes of our conscious be- 
ing which seemed to reflect them, might indeed be 
the burning of the divine fire ; but what was ascer- 
tained was that they did pass away like a devouring 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. Hg 

flame, or like the race of water in the mid-stream ; 
too swiftly for any real knowledge of them to be 
attainable. Ileracliteanism had grown to be almost 
identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist 
Protagoras, that the momentary, sensible apprehen- 
sion of the individual was the only standard of what 
is or is not, and each one the measure of all things 
to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had 
become but an authority for a philosophy of the 
despair of knowledge. 

And as it had been with his earlier followers in 
Greece, so it happened now with his later Roman 
disciple. He, too, halted at the apprehension of 
that swift, energetic motion in things — the drift of 
flowers, of little or great souls, of ambitious systems — 
in the stream around him ; the distant higher reaches 
of which, in possible regions out of sight, counted 
with him but as a dim problem. The bold, pan- 
theistic flight of the old Greek master from the 
fleeting object to that one universal life, in which 
the whole sphere of physical change might be reck- 
oned but as a single pulsation, remained by him 
but as a hypothesis only — the hypothesis he actually 
preferred, as in itself most credible^ however scantily 
realizable even by the imagination — yet still but as 
one unverified hypothesis concerning the first prin- 
ciple of things, among many others. He might re- 
serve it as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very 
remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point, 
indeed, where that ladder seemed to pass into the 
clouds, but for which there was certainly no time left 



i20 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

just now by his eager interest in the real things so 
close to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the 
ground. And those early days of reverie when he 
played at priests, played in many another day-dream, 
working away from the actual present as much as 
he might, with a delightful sense of escape as he 
replaced the outer world of other people by an in- 
ward world of his own as he himself really cared to 
have it, had made him a kind of natural " idealist." 
He had become aware of the possibility of a large dis- 
sidence between an inward and somewhat exclusive 
world of his own vivid apprehensions, and the un- 
improved, unheightened reality of the world of those 
about him ; and was ready now to concede, some- 
what more easily than others, the first point of his 
new lesson, that the individual is to himself the 
measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive 
certainty to himself of his own impressions. To 
move afterwards in that outer world of other people, 
as if taking it at its own estimate, would be possible 
only as a kind of irony. And as with the Yicaire 
Savoyard^ after reflecting on the variations of philos- 
ophy, " the first fruit he drew from that reflection 
was the lesson of a limitation of his researches to 
what immediately interested him ; to rest peacefully 
in a profound ignorance as to all besides ; to disquiet 
himself only concerning those things which it was of 
import for him to know." And at least he would 
entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow 
its due weight to that primary element of incerti 
tude or negation, ia the conditions of man's life, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 12J 

And just here he joined company, retracing in his 
intellectual pilgrimage the actual historic order of 
old philosophy, with another wayfarer on tlie jour- 
ney, another ancient Greek master, the founder of 
the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose impressive, tradi- 
tional utterances (for he had left no writing) served, 
in turn, to give effective outline to his thoughts. 
There was something in the doctrine itself con- 
gruous with the place in which it had sprung up ; 
and for a time Marius lived much, in thought, in the 
brilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious 
name to the philosophy of pleasure. It hung, for 
his fancy, betw^een the mountains and the sea, among 
richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy 
table-land projecting from the African coast, two 
hundred miles south of Greece. There, in a delight- 
ful climate, with something of transalpine temper- 
ance amid its luxury, and withal in an inward at- 
raosphere of temperance, which did but further 
enhance the brillianc}'^ of life, the school of Gyrene 
had maintained itself as almost one with the family 
of its founder ; certainl}' as nothing coarse or un- 
clean ; and under the influence of accomplished 
women. 

Aristippus of Gyrene too had left off in suspense 
of judgment as to what might realh^ lie behind — 
flamrnantia mcenia mundi — the flaming rampart of 
the world. Those strange, bold, skeptical surmises, 
which had haunted the minds of the old Ionian 
physicists as merely abstract doubt, which had been 
present to the mind of Heraclitus, as we saw, as one 



122 MARIUS TH?) EPICUREAN". 

element only in a constructive system of philosophy^ 
became ^vith Aristippus a very subtly practical 
worldly-wisdom. The difference between him and 
those obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that 
between an ancient thinker generally, and a modern 
man of the world ; it was the difference between 
the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in his retreat, 
and the expert, cosmopolitan, administrator of his 
dark sayings, translating the abstract thoughts of 
the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment. It 
has been sometimes seen, in the history of thought, 
that when thus translated into terms of sentiment — 
of sentiment, as fying already half-way towards 
practice — the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the 
first time reveal their true significance. The meta- 
physical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands 
and feet, becomes effective, impressive, fascinating, 
when translated into a precept as to how it were 
best to feel and act ; in other words, under its sen- 
timental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of 
the master of Cyrene, the theory that things are but 
shadows and that we, like them, never continue in 
one stay, might indeed have made itself effective as 
a languid, enervating, consumptive nihilism — as a 
precept of " renunciation," which would touch and 
handle, and busy itself about nothing. But in the 
reception of metaphysical forrnulce^ all depends, as 
regards their ulterior and actual effect, on the pre- 
existent qualities of that soil of human nature on 
which they fall — on the company they find already 
present there, on their admission into the house of 



MARirS THE EPICUREAN. 123 

liioiig'ht ; there being at least so much truth as this in- 
volves in the theological maxim, that the reception of 
this or that speculative conclusion is really a matter 
of will. The persuasion that all is vanity, with tiiat 
happily constituted Greek, who had been a genuine 
disciple of Socrates and I'etlected, presumably, some- 
thino' of his blitheness in the face of the world, his 
happy way of taking all chances, generated neither 
frivolity nor sourness ; but induced, rather, an im- 
pression, just serious enougli, of the call upon men's 
attention of the crisis in which theviind themselves; 
it became a stimulus towards every kind of activity, 
and prompted a perpetual, inextinguishable thirst 
after experience. 

With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher 
of pleasure de|:)ended on this, that in him a doctrine, 
originally somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a rich 
and genial nature, capable of transforming it into a 
theory of practice whi-jh seemed to many to have 
no inconsiderable stimulative power towards a fair 
life. What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of 
one of the happiest temperaments coming, as it were, 
to an understanding with the most depressing of 
theories; accepting the results of a metaphysical 
system to nearly every one so sterile, a system which 
seemed to concentrate into itself all the weakenincr 
trains of thought in earlier Greek speculation, and 
making the best of it; turning its hard, bare truths, 
witli a wonderful tact, into precepts of a most deli- 
cately honorable life. Given the hardest terms, 
supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, even 



124 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

SO, we may well adorn and beautify, in a scrupulous 
self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch 
upon — these wonderful bodies, these material dwell- 
ing-places through which the shadows pass together 
for awhile, the very raiment we wear, our pastimes 
as we say, and the intercourse of society. The best 
judges saw in him something like the graceful 
" humanities " of the later Eoman, and our own 
modern culture, as it is termed ; and Horace re- 
called his sayings to express best his own perfect 
amenity of manner in the reception of life. 

In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of 
that old master of decorous living, those doubts as 
to the criteria of truth reduced themselves to a very 
clear and almost drily practical skepticism, a skepti- 
cism which developed the opposition between things 
as they are and our impressions and thoughts about 
them — the possibility, if an outward world does 
really exist, of some faultiness in our apprehension 
of it — the doctrine, in short, of what is termed " the 
subjectivity of knowledge." It is a consideration, 
indeed, which lies as an element of weakness, like 
some admitted fault or flaw at the very foundation 
of every philosophical account of the universe ; which 
confronts all philosophies at their starting, but with 
which none have really dealt conclusively, some 
Derhaps not quite sincerely; which those who are 
not philosophers dissipate by common, but unphilo- 
sophical sense, or by religious faith. It was the 
peculiar strength of Marius to have apprehended 
this weakness at the very foundations of human 



MARIIJS THE EPICUREAN. 125 

knowledge, in the whole range of its consequences. 
Our knowledge is limited to what we feel, he re- 
flected ; we need no proof that Ave feel. But can we 
be sure that things are at all like our feelings? 
Mere peculiarities in the instruments of our cog- 
nition like the little waves and knots in a mirror, 
may distort the matter which the\' seem but to rep- 
resent. Of other people we cannot really know 
even the feelinos, nor how far thev would indicate 
the same modifications, each one of a personality 
really unique, in using the same terms as ourselves; 
that "common experience," which is sometimes 
proposed as a satisfactory basis of certainty, being 
after all only a fixity of language. But our own 
impressions ! — The brightness and heat of the blue 
veil over our heads, if it be indeed a veil over any- 
thing ! — How reassuring, after assisting at so long 
a debate about rival ci'iteria of truth, to fall back 
upon direct sensation, to limit one's aspiration after 
knowledge to that! In an age, still materially so 
brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of 
material things, with sensible capacities still unjaded, 
with the whole world of classic art and poetry out 
spread before it, and where there was more than 
eye or ear could well take in — how natural the de- 
termination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena 
of the senses, which certainly never deceive us about 
themselves, about which alone we can never deceive 
ourselves ! 

So, the merely abstract, skeptical apprehension 
that the little point of the present moment a.lpAe 



126 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

really is, between a past which has just ceased to be 
and the future which may never come, became 
practical with Mai'ius, as the resolution, as far as 
possible, to exclude regret and desire, and yield him- 
self to the improvement of the present with an 
absolutely disengaged mind. America is here and 
now — here or nowhere — as Wilhelm Meister finds 
out one day, just not too late, after so long looking 
vaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the 
development of his capacities. It was as if, recog- 
nizing perpetual motion as the law of nature, Marius 
identified his own way of life cordially with it, 
" throwino^ himself into the stream," as we sav : he 
too must maintain a harmony with that soul of 
motion in things, by a constantly renewed mobility 
of character. 

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res — 

so Horace had summed up tijat perfect manner in 
the reception of life, attained by his old Cyrenaic 
master ; and the first practical consequence of the 
metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner,, 
had been the limitation, almost the renunciation, of 
metaphysical inquiry itself. Metaphysic — that art, 
as it has so often proved, in the words of Michelet, 
de s^egarer avec inHhode^ of bewildering oneself me- 
thodically — one must spend little time upon that! 
In the school of Cyrene, great as was its mental 
incisiveness, logical and physical speculations, the- 
oretical interests generally, had been valued only so 
lar a3 they served to give a groundwork, an intfi 



MARIUS THE EPICUREA^^. 127 

lectual justification, to that exclusive limitation to 
practical ethics which was a note of the Cyrenaic 
philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how true 
to itself, under how many varieties of character, had 
been the effort of the Greeks alter "theory" — thedria 
— that vision of a wholly reasonable world, which, 
according to the greatest of them, literally makes 
man like God; how loyally they had still persisted 
in the quest after that, in spite of how many disap- 
])ointments ! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps, 
some of them might have found the sort of vision 
they were really seeking for; but not in ''doubtful 
disputations" concerning "being" and "not-being," 
knowledge and appearance. Men's minds (even 
young men's minds) at that late day, might well 
seem oppressed by the ennui of systems which had 
so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind 
of Marius, as in that old school of Gyrene, this 
ennui, combined, as it was, with appetites so vigorous 
and youthful, brought about a reaction, in which, by 
a sort of suicidal dialectic (examples of which have 
been seen since) a great metaphysical acuteness w-as 
devoted to the function of proving metaphysical 
speculation impossible, or useless. Abstract theory 
was to be valued only so far as it might serve to 
clear the tablet of the mind from suppositions only 
half realizable, or wholly visionary, and leave it, in 
flawless evenness, to the impressions of a direct and 
concrete experience. 

To be absolutely virgin towards a direct and con- 
crete experience, to rid ourselves of those abstractions 



128 MAPJUS THE EPICUREAN. 

which are but the ghosts of by-gone impressions—of 
the notions we have made for ourselves, and which 
so often do but misrepresent the experience they 
profess to represent — idola^ idols, or false appear- 
ances, as Bacon calls them later — to neutralize the 
distorting influence of metaphysical theory by an all- 
accomplished theoretic skill — it is tiiis hard, bold, 
sober recognition, under a very " dry light," of its 
own proper aims, in union with a habit of feeling 
which on the practical side may leave a broad open- 
ing to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic 
doctrine, to reproductions of that doctrine in the 
time of Marius or in our own, their gravity and im- 
portance. To that school the young man would 
come, eager for truth, expecting much from phil- 
osophy, in no ignoble curiositv, aspiring after noth- 
ing less than an " initiation." He would be sent 
back, sooner or later, to experience, to the world of 
concrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, 
heard, felt by him ; but with a wonderful machinery 
of observation and free from the tyranny of mer« 
theories. 

So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation whicfc 
followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius 
ran on, as he felt himself, as it were, back again in 
the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school 
of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old 
Greek colony, on its fresh upland by the sea. Not 
pleasure, but fulness, completeness of life generally 
was the practical ideal to w^hich this anti-metaphys. 
ical metaphysic really pointed. And towards such 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 129 

a full or complete life, a life of various yet select 
sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary 
must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, free- 
dom from all the partial and misrepresentative doc- 
trine which does but relieve one element in our ex- 
perience at the cost of another, freedom from all 
the embarrassment of regret for the past and calcu- 
lation on the future ; all that would be but prelimin- 
ary to the real business of education — insight, insight 
through culture, into all that the present moment 
holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its 
presence. From that theory of Life as the end of 
life^ followed, as a practical consequence, the desir- 
ableness of refining all the instruments of inward 
and outward intuition, of developing all their ca- 
pacities, of testing and exercising oneself in them, 
till one's whole nature should become a complex 
medium of reception, towards the vision — the beatific 
vision, if one really cared to make it such — of our 
actual experience in the world. Xot the conveyance 
of an abstract body of truths or principles, would 
be the aim of the right education of oneself, or of 
another, but the conveyance of an art — an art in 
some degree peculiar and special to each individual ; 
with the modifications, that is, due to his peculiar 
constitution, and the circumstances of his growth, in- 
asmuch as no one of us is " like another all in alL" 
9 



CHAPTER IX. 

NEW CYRENAICISM. 

Such were the practical conclusions drawn for 
himself bv Marius, when somewhat later he had 
outgrown the mastery of others, from the principle 
that " all is vanity." If he could but count upon 
the present, if a life brief at best could not certainly 
be shown to lead to anything beyond itself, if men's 
highest curiosity was indeed so persistently baffled 
— then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at 
least fill up the measure of that present with vivid 
sensations, and those intellectual apprehensions, 
which, in strength and directness and their immedi- 
ately realized values at the bar of actual experience, 
are most like sensations. So some have spoken in 
every age of thought; for, like all theories which 
really express a strong natural tendency of the 
human mind or even one of its characteristic modes 
of weakness, this vein of reflection is a constant 
tradition in philosophy. Every age of European 
thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under 
many disguises ; even under the hood of the monk. 
But — T.et us eat and drinlc.for to-inorroi/) lue die !—y' 
is a principle, the real import of -which differs im- 
mensely according to the natural taste and the ao 
130 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. ISl 

quired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table. 
It may express nothing better than the instinct of 
Dante's Ciacco, the accomplished glutton, in the 
mud of the Inferno\ or, since on no hypothesis does 
man *' live by bread alone,''' it may come to be 
identical with — " My meat is to do what is just and 
kind;" while the soul, which cannot pretend to the 
apprehension of anything bej^ond the veil of immedi- 
ate experience, yet never loses a feeling of happiness 
in conforming to the highest moral ideal it can sin- 
cerely define for itself ; and actually, though but 
with so faint hope; does the " Father's business." 

In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely dis- 
abused of the metaphysical ambition to pass beyond 
" the flaming rampart of the world," but on the other 
hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of intel- 
lectual products, with so wide a view before it over 
all varieties of what is powerful or attractive in man 
and his works, the thoughts of Marius did but follow 
the line taken by the majority of educated persons, 
though to a very different issue. Pitched to a really 
high and serious key, the precept — Be perfect inre- 
gard to what is here and novj — the precept of "cul- 
ture" as it is called — that is, of a complete education — 
might at least save him from the heaviness and vul- 
garity of a generiition, certainly of no general fineness 
of temper, but with much material well-being. Con- 
ceded that what is secure in our existence is but the 
sharp apex of the present moment between two 
hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our 
experience but a series of fleetmg impressions — so he 



132 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

continued the skeptical argument he had condensed, 
as the matter to hold b\% from his various philo- 
sophical reading — given, that we are never to get 
beyond the walls of this closely shut cell of our own 
subjective personality ; if the ideas we are somehow 
impelled to form of an outer world, and even of other 
minds akin to our own, are, it may be, but a day- 
dream, and the thought of a world be3^ond, a da}'"- 
dream probably thinner still : then, he, at least, in 
whom those fleeting impressions — faces, voices, 
material sunshine — were very real and imperious, 
might well set himself to the consideration, how such 
actual moments as they passed might be made to 
yield him their utmost, by the most dexterous train- 
ing of his capacities. Amid abstract metaphysical 
doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond 
that experience, reinforcing the deep original materi- 
alism or earthliness of human nature itself, bound 
so intimately to the visible world, let him at least 
make the most of what was " here and now,'* In 
the actual dimness of ways from means to ends — 
ends though in themselves excellent, yet for the 
most part distant, and for him, certainly, below the 
visible horizon — he would at all events be sure that 
the means, to use the well-worn phraseology, should 
have something of finality or perfection about them, 
and themselves partake, in a measure, of that more 
excellent nature of ends — that the means should 
justify the end. 

With this view he would demand culture, as the 
Cyrenaics said, or, in other words, a wide and various 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 133 

education — an education partly negative, as defining 
the true limits of man's capacity, but, for the most 
part positive, and directed especially to the enlarging 
and refinement of the receptive powers; of those 
powers, above all, whicli are directly relative to fleet- 
ing phenomena — the powers of sensation and emo- 
tion. In such an education, an " aesthetic " educa- 
tion, as it might now be termed, and certainly oc- 
cupied very largely with those aspects of things 
which affect us pleasurably through the senses, art, 
of course, including all the finer sorts of literature, 
would have a great part to play. The study of 
music, in the wider Platonic sense, according to 
which. Music comprehends all those things over 
which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, would 
conduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all the 
finer traits of nature and of man. Nay ! — the pro- 
ducts of the imagination must themselves be held to 
present the most perfect forms of life — spirit and 
matter, alike, under their purest and most perfect 
conditions — the most strictly appropriate object of 
that impassioned contemplation, which, in the world 
of intellectual discipline, as in the highest forms of 
■ morality and religion, must be held to be the essen- 
tial function of the *' perfect." Such a manner of 
life might itself even come to seem a kind of 
religion — an inward, visionary, mystic piety or relig- 
ion — by virtue of its effort to live days '' lovely and 
pleasant" in themselves, here and now, and with an 
all-sufficiency of well-being in the immediate sense 
of the object contemplated, independently of any 



134 MARIUS THE EPR^UREAN. 

faith, or hope that might be entertained, as to their 
ultimate tendency. In this way, the true " aesthetic 
culture " would be realizable as a new form of the 
'' contemplative life," founding' its claim on the essen- 
tial " blessedness" of " vision" — the vision of per- 
fect men and things. One's human nature, indeed, 
would fain reckon on an assured, unending future — 
on the vision of a final home, to be attained at some 
still distant date, it may be, ye with a conscious, de- 
lightful home-coming at last, as depicted in many an 
old poetic Eh^sium. But then, on the other hand, the 
world of perfected sensation, emotion, intelligence, 
is so close to us, and so attractive, that the most 
visionary can but paint that other distant home in 
colors really borrowed from it. Let me be sure 
then — might '.m not plausibly say? — that- I miss no 
circumstance of this world of realized consciousness 
in the present ! Here, at least, is a visi jn^ a theory — 
theoria — which reposes upon no basis of unverified 
hypothesis, and makes no call upon a future really 
problematic ; as it would be unaffected b\^ any dis- 
covery of an Empedocles (improving upon Hesiod, 
or the old story of Prometheus) as to what had been 
really the origin, and course of development, of 
man's actually attained faculties, and that seemingly 
divine particle of reason or spirit, in him. Such a 
theory, at more leisurable moments, would, of course, 
have its precepts to propound, on the embellishment, 
generally, of wtiatls near at hand, on the adornment 
of life ; till, in a not impracticable rule of conduct, 
one's existence, from day to day, would come to be 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 135 

like a well-executed piece of music; that " perpetual 
motion" in things (so Marius figured the matter to 
himself, under the '>ld Greek imageries) according 
itself to a kind of '-adence or harmony. 

It was intelhgibie that this" aesthetic" philosophy 
might find itself (theoretically, at least, and as by 
way of a curious question in casuistry, legitimate 
from its own }>oint of view) weighing the claims of 
that eager, conceit trated, impassioned realization of 
experience, against the claims of the receiv^ed mo- 
rality. Conceiving its own function in a somewhat 
desperate temper, anti becoming, as every high-strung 
form of sentiment, as oven the religious sentiment 
itself, may .lecom«, somewhat antinomian, when, in 
its effort tov\ards the order of experiences it prefers, 
it is confroivf-ed with <;if\e traditional and popular 
morality, at points wh-^ie that morality ma}^ look 
very like a convention, or a mere stage-property of 
the world, it would be found, from time to time, 
breaking beyond the lim!i,s of the actual moral order ; 
perhaps, not without soivie pleasurable excitement in 
so bold a venture. 

With the possibility of some such hazard as that, 
in thought or even in practice — that it might be, 
though refining, and even bracing, for those strong 
and in health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and 
temperate wisdom of Montaigne, " pernicious for 
those who have any natural tendency to impiety or 
vice," the line of reflection traced out above, was 
fairly chargeable ; not, however, with being, as a 
necessary consec^uence, 'hedonistic,'-' Marius was 



136 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

still pure and strong. He knew that his carefully 
considered theory of practice braced him, with the 
effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind 
every morning, towards the work of a student, for 
which he might seem intended. Yet there were 
some among his acquaintance who jumped to the 
conclusion that, with the " Epicurean stye," he was 
making pleasure — pleasure, as they so poorly con- 
ceived it — the sole motive of life ; and precluded any 
exacter estimate of the situation by covering it with 
a high-sounding general term, through the vagueness 
of which they were enabled to see the severe and 
laborious youth in the vulgar company of Lais. 
Words like " hedonism " — terms of large and vague 
comprehension — especially when used with an avow- 
edly controversial purpose, have ever been the worst 
examples of what are called " question-begging 
terms ; " and in that late age in which Marius lived, 
amid the dust of so many centuries of philosophical 
debate, the air was full of them. Yet those who 
used that reproachful Greek term for the philosophy 
of pleasure, were hardly more likely than the old 
Greeks themselves, (on whom regarding this very 
subject of the theory of pleasure, their masters in the 
art of correct thinking had so emphatically to im- 
press the necessity of ^' making distinctions,") to 
come to any very delicately correct ethical conclu- 
sions by a reasoning, which began with a general 
term, comprehensive enough to cover pleasures so 
different in quality, in their causes and effects, as 
the pleasures of wine and love, of art and science, of 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 13^ 

religious enthusiasm ajid political enterprise, and of 
that taste or curiosity, which satisfied itself with 
long days of serious study. Yet, in truth, each of 
those pleasurable modes of activity may, in its turn, 
fairly become the ideal of the " hedonistic " doctrine. 
Really, to the phase of reflection through which 
JVIarius was then passing, the charge of " hedonism,'' 
whatever its real weight might be, was not properly 
applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fulness of life, 
and '• insight " as conducting to that fulness — energy, 
choice, and variety of experience — including noble 
pain and sorrow even, — loves such as those in the 
exquisite old story of Apuleius ; such sincere and 
strenuous forms of the moral life, as Seneca and 
Epictetus — whatever form of human life, in short, 
was impassioned and ideal ; it was from these that 
the " new Cyrenaicism " of Marius took its criterion 
of values. It was a theory, indeed, which might 
rightly be regarded as in a great degree coincident 
with the main principle of the Stoics themselves, 
and a version of the precept " Whatsoever thy hand 
findeth to do, do it with all thv mio:ht" — a doctrine 
so widely acceptable among the nobler spirits of that 
time : and as with that, its mistaken tendency would 
lie in the direction of a kind of idolatry of mere life^ 
or natural gift, or strength — Vidolatrie des talents. 

To understand the various forms of ancient art 
and thought, the various forms of actual human 
feeling (the only new thing, in a world almost too 
rich in what was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scru- 
pulous equity, the claims of these concrete and ac- 



1;}8 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

tual objects on his sympathy, his intelligence, his 
senses — to " pluck out the heart of their mystery," 
and in turn become the interpreter of them to others ; 
— that had now defined itself as a very narrowly 
practical motive with Marius, it determined his 
choice of a vocation to live by. It was the age of 
the rhetoricians, or sophists^ as they were sometimes 
called ; of men who came in some instances to great 
fame and fortune, by way of a literary cultivation 
of "science." That science, it has been often said, 
must have been wholly an affair of words. But in 
a world, confessedlv so rich in what was ancient, 
the work, even of genius, must necessaril}^ consist 
very much in criticism : and, in the case of the more 
excellent specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, 
after all, the eloquent and effective interpreter, for 
the delighted ears of others, of what understanding 
himself had come by, in years of travel and stud}^, 
of the beautiful house of art and thought of which 
that age was the inheritor. The emperor Marcus 
Aurelius, to whose service Marius had now been 
called, was himself, more or less openly, a lecturer. 
That late world, amid many cui'iously vivid modern 
traits, had this spectacle of the public lecturer or 
essayist ; in. some cases adding to his other gifts that 
of the Christian preacher who knows how to touch 
people's sensibilities on behalf of the suffering. To 
follow in the way of these successes, was the natural 
instinct of vouthful ambition : and it was with no 
vulgar egotism, that Marius, at the age of twenty 
years, determined to enter, like many another 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 139 

young man of parts, as a student of rhetoric, at 
Rome. 

Though he had changed, formally, from poetry to 
prose, he was still, and must always be, of the poetic 
temper : by which, I mean, among other things, that, 
quite independently of the general habit of that pen- 
sive age, he lived much, and as it were by system, in 
memory. Amid all that eager grasping at the sen- 
sation, the consciousness, of the present, he had come 
to see that, after all, the main point of economy in 
the conduct of that present, was the question — How 
will it look to me, at Avhat shall I value it, this day 
next year? — that, in a given day or month, one's 
main concern was its impression for the memory. 
A strange trick his memory would play him some- 
times ; for, as if without natural gradation, things of 
last month, or of yesterday, would seem as far off, 
as detached from him, as things of ten years ago. 
Detached from him, yet very real — certain spaces of 
his life lay in delicate perspective, under a favorable 
light ; and, somehow, all less choice detail and cir- 
cumstance had parted from them. Such hours were 
oftenest those in which he had been helped by the 
work of others to the pleasurable apprehension of 
art, or nature, or life. " Not what I do, but what 
I am, under the power of this vision" — he would 
sa}^ to himself — " is what were indeed pleasing to 
the gods." 

And yet, with a kind of inconsistenc}^ in one who 
had taken for his philosophic ideal the ixov6y^po\>o<i ijdovyi 
of Aristippus — the pleasure of the ideal present, the 



140 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

mystic 7iow— there would come, together witb that 
precipitate sinking of things into tlie past, a desire to 
retain " what was so transitive." Coukl he but arrest 
for others also, certain clauses of experience, as that 
imaginative memory presented them to himself ! In 
those grand, hot summers, he would have imprisoned 
the very perfume of the flowers. To create — to live, 
})erhaps, a little beyond the allotted span, in some 
fragment even, of perfect expression — was the form 
his longing took, for something to hold by and rest 
on, amid i\\e jyerpetualfliix. With men of his chosen 
vocation, people were apt to say, words were things. 
Well ! with him, words should be indeed things — the 
word, the phi'ase, valuable in exact proportion to the 
transparency with which it conveyed to others the 
apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real 
within himself. Verba jprovisam rem non invita sequen- 
tur — Virile apprehension of the true nature of things, 
of the true nature of one's own impression, first of 
all — words would follow that, naturallv ; a riffht 
understanding of oneself being the first precept of 
genuine style. Language, delicate and measured — 
the delicate Attic phrase, for instance, in which the 
eminent Aristeides could speak — w^as then a power 
to which people's hearts, and sometimes even their 
purses, readily responded. And there were many 
points, as Marius thought, on which the heart of that 
age greatly needed to be touched. lie hardly knew 
how strong that old religious sense of responsibihtj'', 
the conscience as we call it, still was within him — a 
body of inward impressions, as real as those so highly 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 141 

valued outward ones — concerning other people's feel- 
ings or impressions, among other matters ; to offend 
against which, brought with it, in his case, a strange 
sensation of disloyalty, as to a person. And the 
determination, adhered to with no misgiving, as being 
somehow a part of himself, to add nothing, not so 
much as a passing sigh even, to the great total of 
men's unhappiness, in his way through the world : — 
that too was something to hold by, in the drift of 
mere " appearances." 

And all this would involve a life of industry, of 
industrious study, only possible through healthy rule, 
keeping the eye of body and spirit clear. It was the 
male element, the remorselessly logical conscious- 
ness, asserting itself, with opening manhood — assert- 
ing itself, even in his literary style, by a certain firm- 
ness of outline, that touch of the worker in metal, 
amid its richness. Already he blamed instinctively 
alike in his work and in himself, as youth so rarely 
does, all that had not passed a long and liberal 
process of erasure. The happy phrase or sentence 
was really modeled upon a cleanly finished structure 
of scrupulous thought. The suggestive force of the 
one master of his development, who had battled so 
hard with imaginative prose : the utterance, the 
golden utterance, of the other master, so content with 
its living power of persuasion that he had never writ- 
ten at all, — in the commixture of those two qualities, 
he set up his literary ideal : and its rare blending of 
grace with an intellectual hardness or astringency, 
was the secret gf a singular expressiveness in it, 



142 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

He acquired at this time a certain bookishness, the 
somewhat somber habitude of the avowed scholar 
which, though it never interfered with the perfect 
tone, " fresh and serenely disposed," of the Roman 
gentleman, yet qualified it as by an interesting 
oblique trait, and frightened away some of his equals 
in age and rank. The sober discretion of his 
thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, the sense 
of those negative conclusions enabling him to con- 
centrate himself with an absorption so entire upon 
what is immediately here and now^ while he lived so 
intently in the world, yet with an air so disengaged, 
gave him a peculiar expression of intellectual confi- 
dence, as of one who had indeed been initiated into 
a great secret. And now, in the reaction against 
that preoccupation with other persons, which had so 
often perturbed his spirit, his wistful speculation as 
to what the real, the greater experience might be, 
determined itself in him, not as the longing for love 
— to be with Aspasia, or Cynthia — but as a thirst 
for existence in exquisite places. The veil, which 
was to be lifted up for him, lay over the works of 
old mastery in art, in places where nature also had 
used her mastery. And it was just then that th« 
summons to Rome came. 



CHAPTEE X. 

MIEUM EST UT ANIMUS AGITATIONK MOTUQUE 
CORPORIS EXCITETUR. 

Pliny's Letters. 

Many points in that train of thought, its harder 
and more energetic practical details especially, at first 
surmised but vaguely in the intervals of his visits to 
the tomb of Flavian, chained the consistencv of formal 
principle amid the stirring incidents of the journey, 
which took him, still in all the buoyancy of his nine- 
teen years and greatly expectant, to Rome. That 
summons had come from one of the former friends of 
his father in the capital, who had been able, though 
unsuspected, to keep himself acquainted with the 
lad's progress, and who, assured of his parts, his 
courtly ways, and above all of his beautiful penman- 
ship, now oflFered him a place, virtually that of an 
amanuensis^ near the person of the philosophic em- 
peror. The old town-house of his family on the 
Caelian, so long neglected, might well require his per- 
sonal care ; and Marius, relieved a little by his prep- 
arations for traveling from that over-tension of 
spirit, in which he had lived of late, was soon after- 
wards, on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius, 

on his expected return to Rome, after a first success, 

143 



144 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

illusive enough as it was soon to appear^ against the 
invaders from beyond the Danube. 

The opening stage of his journey, through the firm 
golden weather, for which he had lingered three days 
beyond the appointed time of starting — days brown 
with the first rains of autumn — brought him, by the 
by- ways among the lower slopes of the Apennines of 
Luna, to the town of Luca, a station on the Cassian 
Way ; traveling so far, mainly on foot, the baggage 
following under the care of his attendants. He wore 
a broad felt hat, in fashion not very unlike a more 
modern pilgrim's, the neat head projecting from the 
collar of his gra.j pcenida or traveling mantle, sewed 
closely together over the breast, but with the two 
sides folded back over the shoulders ; to leave the 
arms free in walking ; and was altogether so trim 
and fresh, that, as he climbed the hill from Pisa, by 
the long steep lane through the olive-yards, and 
turned to gaze where he could just discern the cy- 
presses of the old school garden, like two black lines 
upon the yellow avails, a little child took possession 
of his hand, and, looking up at him with entire con- 
fidence, paced on bravely at his side, for the mere 
pleasure of his company, to the spot where the road 
sank again into the valley beyond. From this point, 
leaving his servants at a distance, he surrendered 
himself, a willing subject, as he walked, to the im- 
pressions of the road, and was almost surprised, both 
at the suddenness with which evening came on, and 
the distance from his old home at which it found 
him. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. I45 

And at the little town of Luca, he felt that inde* 
scribable sense of a welcoming in the mere outward 
appearance of things, which seems to mark out certain 
places for the special purpose of evening rest, and 
gives them always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. 
Under the deepening twilight, the I'ough-tiled roofs 
seem to huddle together side by side, like one con- 
tinuous shelter over the whole township, spread low 
and broad over the snug sleeping-rooms within ; and 
the place one sees for the first time, and must tarry 
in but for a night, breathes the very spirit of home. 
The cottagers lingered at their doors for a few 
minutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to 
rest early ; though there was still a glow along the 
road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were 
still awake about the crumbling gray heights of an 
old temple ; and yet so quiet and air-swept was the 
place, you could hardly tell where the country left 
off in it, and the field-paths became its streets. J^ext 
morning he must needs change the manner of his jour- 
ney. The light baggage- wagon returned, and he pro- 
ceeded now more quickly, traveling a stage or two by 
post, along the Cassian Way, where the figures and 
incidents of the great high-road seemed already to tell 
of the capital, the one center to which all were hast- 
ening, or had lately bidden adieu. That Way lay 
through the heart of the old, mysterious and visionary 
country of Etruria ; and what he knew of its strange 
religion of the dead, reinforced by the actual sight of 
its funeral houses scattered so plentifully among the 
dwellings of the living, revived in him for a while 
10 



146 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

in all its strength, his old instinctive yearning towards 
those inhabitants of the shadowy land he had known 
in life. It seemed to him that he could half divine 
how time passed in those painted houses on the hill- 
sides, among the gold and silver ornaments, the 
wrought armor and vestments, the drowsy and dead 
attendants : and the close consciousness of that vast 
population gave him no fear, but rather a sense of 
companionship, as he climbed the hill on foot behind 
the horses, through the genial afternoon. 

The road, next day, passed below a town as primi- 
tive it might seem as the rocks it perched on — white 
rocks which had been long glistening before him in 
the distance. Down the dewy paths the people were 
descending from it, to keep a holiday, high and low 
alike in rough, white linen smocks. A homely old 
play was just begun in an open-air theater, the grass- 
grown seats of which had been hollow^ed out in the 
turf ; and Marius caught the terrified expression of a 
child in its mother's arms as it turned from the 
yawning mouth of a great mask, for refuge in her 
bosom. The way mounted, and descended again, 
down the steep street of another place — all resound- 
ing with the noise of metal under the hammer ; for 
every house had its brazier's workshop, the bright 
objects of brass and copper gleaming, like lights in a 
cave, out of their dark roofs and corners. Around 
the anvils the children were watching the work, or 
ran to fetch water to the hissing, red-hot metal ; 
and Marius too watched, as he took his hasty mid-day 
refreshment, a mess of chestnut meal and cheese. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 147 

while the curved surfaces of a great copper water- 
vessel became flowered all over with tiny petals under 
the skilful strokes. Towards dusk, a frantic woman 
at the roadside stood and cried out the words of 
some philter, or malison, in verse, with a weird mo- 
tion of her hands, as the travelers passed, like a wild 
picture drawn from Virgil. 

But all along, accompanying the superficial grace 
of these incidents of the way, Marius noted, more 
and more as he drew nearer to Rome, the records of 
the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, 
there had been many enactments to improve the 
condition of the slaves. The ergastula had been 
abolished. But no system of free labor had as yet 
succeeded : and a whole mendicant population, art- 
fully exaggerating every circumstance and symptom 
of misery, still hung around, or sheltered themselves 
within the vast walls of their old, half-ruined task- 
houses. And for the most part they had been 
variously stricken by the pestilence. For once, the 
heroic level had been reached in rags, squints, scars — 
every caricature of the human type — ravaged beyond 
what could have been thought possible if it were 
to survive at all. Meantime, the farms v/ere less 
carefully tended than of old : here and there they 
were lapsing into their natural wildness : and some 
villas also had partly fallen into ruin. The pictur- 
esque, romantic Italy of a later time — the Italy of 
Claude and Salvator Rosa — was already forming, 
for the delight of the modern romantic traveler. 

And again Marius was aware of a real change in 



148 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

things, on crossing the Tiber, as if some magic effect 
lay in that ; though here, in truth, the Tiber was but 
a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, 
under the richer sky, seemed readier and more 
affluent, and man fitter to his circumstances : even 
in people hard at work there seemed to be a less 
burdensome sense of the mere business of life. How 
dreamily the women were passing up through the 
broad lights and shadows of the steep streets, with 
their great water-pots resting on their heads, like 
women of Car^^se, set free from their slavery in old 
Greek temples. With what a fresh and primitive 
poetry was daily life here impressed — all the details 
of the threshing-floor and the vineyard — the common 
farm-life, even — the great bakers' fires gleaming out 
on the road in the evening. In the presence of all 
that, Marius was for a "moment like those old, early, 
unconscious poets, who made the famous Greek 
myths of Dionysus, and the Great Mother, out of 
the imagery of the wine-press and the plow-share. 
And still the motion of the journey was bringing 
his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to 
have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, 
on his way hither. The formative, and literary 
stimulus (so to call it) of peaceful exercise, which he 
bad always observed in himself, doing its utmost 
now, form and matter of thought alike detached 
themselves clearly and readily from the healthfully 
excited brain. " It is wonderful," says Pliny, " how 
the mind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily exer- 
cise." The prpsentable aspects of inmost thought 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. I49 

and feeling became clear to him ; the structure of 
all he meant, its order and outline, defined itself ; 
his general sense of fitness and beaut}^ in words be- 
came effective in daintily pliant sentences, with all 
sorts of felicitous linking of figure and abstraction. 
It seemed just then as if the desire of the artist in 
him — that old longing to produce — might be satis- 
fied by the exact and just expression merely of 
what was then passing around him, in simple prose, 
arresting the desirable moment as it passed, and 
prolonging its life a little. To live in the concrete ! 
To be sure, at least, of one's hold upon that ! — Again, 
his philosophic scheme was but the reflection of the 
data of sense, and chiefly of sight, a reduction to 
the abstract, of the brilliant road he traveled on, 
through the sunshine. 

But on the seventh evening there came a reaction 
in the cheerful flow of our traveler's thoughts ; a 
reaction with which mere bodily fatigue, asserting 
itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do : and 
he fell into a mood,known to all passably sentimen- 
tal wayfarers, as night deepens again and again over 
their path, in which all journeying from home, from 
the known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure 
as a mere foolish truancy — like a child's running 
away — with the feeling that one had best return at 
once, even through the darkness. He had chosen 
to climb on foot, at his leisure, the long windings, 
by which the road ascended to a place where that 
day's stage was to end, and found himself alone in the 
twilight, far behind the rest of his traveling-com- 



X50 MARIUS THE EPiCUREAN. 

panions. Would the last ziyzao-, round and round 
those dark masses, half natural rock, half artificial 
substructure, ever bring him within the circuit of 
the walls above? Just thei. a startling incident 
turned those misgivings almost into actual fear. 
From the steep slope, a heav mass of stone was de- 
tached, after some whisperings among the trees 
above his head, and rushing down through the still- 
ness fell to pieces in a cloud of dust across the road 
just behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his 
heel. That was sufficient, jusr ttien,-to rouse out of 
its hiding-place his old vague fear of evil — of one's 
" enemies " — a distress, so much a matter of consti- 
tution with him, that at times it would seem that 
the best pleasures of life could but be snatched, as 
it were hastily, in just one moment's forgetfulness 
of its dark, besetting influence. A sudden suspicion 
of hatred against him, of the nearness of " enemies,'* 
seemed all at once to alter the visible form of things, 
as with the child's hero, w^hen he found the footprint 
on the sand of his peaceful, dreamy island. His 
elaborate philosophy had nor put beneath his feet the 
terror of mere bodily evils : much less of " inexorable 
fate and the noise of greedy Acheron," 

The resting-place to which he presently came, in 
the keen vrholesome air of the market-place of the 
little hill-town, was a pleasant contrast to that last 
effort o;" his journey. The room in which he sat down 
to sup, unlike the majority of Roman inns at that day, 
was neat and fresh. The firelight danced cheerfully 
upon the polished, three-wicked lucernoB, burning 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 151 

cleanly with the best oil, upon the whitewashed 
walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in 
glass goblets. The white wine of the place put be- 
fore him, of the true color and flavor of the grape, 
and with a little ring of delicate foam as it mounted 
in the glass, had a reviving edge or freshness in it, 
which he had found in no other w^ine. These things 
had relieved a little the melancholy of the hour be- 
fore; and it was just then that he heard the voice of 
one, new^ly arrived at the inn, making his way to the 
upper floor — a 3^outhful voice, with a reassuring 
clearness of note, which completed his cure. 

He seemed to hear that voice again in his dreams, 
uttering his own name ; and waking m the full 
morning light and gazing from the window, saw the 
guest of the night before, a very honorable-looking 
youth, in the rich habit of a military knight, stand- 
ing beside his horse, and already making prepara- 
tions to depart. It happened that Marius, too, was 
to make that dav's iournev on horseback. Ridino^ 
presently from the inn, he overtook Cornelius — of 
the Twelfth Legion — advancing carefully down the 
steep street ; and before they had issued from the 
gates of Urhs- Vetus, the two young men had broken 
into talk together. They w^ere passing along the 
street of the goldsmiths ; and Cornelius must needs 
enter one of the workshops for the repair of some 
button or link of his knightly trappings. Standing 
in the doorway, Marius watched the work, as he 
had watched the braziers' business a few days before, 
wondering most at the simplicity of its processes, a 



152 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

simplicity, however, on which only genius in that 
craft could have lighted. — By what unguessed-at 
stroke of hand, for instance, had the grains of 
precious metal associated themselves with so daintily 
regular a roughness, over the surface of the little 
casket yonder ? And the conversation which fol- 
lowed, hence arising, left the two travelers with suflB- 
cient interest in each other to insure an easy compan- 
ionship for the remainder of their journey. In time 
to come, Marius was to depend ver}^ much on the 
preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade 
who now laid his hand so brotherlv on his shoulder, 
as they left the workshop. 

Itineris tnatutini gratiam cwpimus — quoted one : 
and their road that day lay through a country, well 
fitted, by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen 
a first acquaintance into intimacy ; its superficial 
ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon each 
other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas ; 
the tension of which, however, it Avould relieve, ever 
and anon, by the unexpected assertion of a singular 
attractiveness. The superficial aspect of the land 
was, indeed, in spite of its abundant ilex and olive, 
anpleasing enough. A river of clay seemed "in 
some old night of time " to have burst up over 
valley and hill, and hardened there, into fantastic 
shelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock, up 
and down among the contorted vegetation ; the hoary 
roots and trunks seeming to confess some weird 
kinship with them. But that was long ago ; and 
these pallid hillsides needed only the declining sun, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 153 

touching the rock with purple, and thro wing .deeper 
shadow into the immemorial foliage, to put on a 
peculiar, because a very austere and grave, kind of 
beauty; while the graceful outlines common to 
volcanic hills asserted themselves in the broader 
prospect. And, for sentimental Marius, all this 
associated itself, by a perhaps fantastic affinity, 
with a peculiar trait of severity, beyond his guesses 
as to the secret of it, which mingled with the 
blitheness of his new companion. Concurring, 
indeed, with the condition of a Roman soldier, it 
was certainly something far more than the expres- 
sion of military hardness, or ascesis ; and what was 
earnest, or austere even, in the landscape they had 
traversed together, seemed to have been waiting for 
the passing of this figure to interpret or inform it. 
Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid 
personal presence broke through the dreamy ideal- 
Ism, which had almost come to doubt of other men's 
reality — reassuringly, indeed ; yet not without 
some sense of a constraining tyranny over him, from 
without. 

For Cornelius, returning from the campaign, to 
take up his quarters on the Palatine, in the imperial 
guard, seemed to carry about with him, in that real 
world of comely usages and privileges to which he 
belonged, the atmosphere of some still more jealous 
and exclusive circle. They halted at noon next day, 
not at an inn, but at the house of one of the vouno^ 
soldier's friends ; whom they found absent, indeed, 
in consequence of the plague in those parts, so that 
after a mid-day rest only, they proceeded again on 



154 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

their journey. The great room of the villa, to which 
they were admitted, had lain long untouched ; and 
the dust rose, as they entered, into the slanting bars 
of sunlight, which fell through the half-closed 
shutters. It was here, to while away the time, that 
Cornelius bethought himself of displaying to his 
new friend the various articles and ornaments of his 
knightly array — the breastplate, the sandals and 
cuirass, lacing them on, one by one, with the assist- 
ance of Marius, and finally the great golden brace- 
let on the right arm, conferred on him by his general 
for an act of valor. And as he gleamed there, amid 
that odd interchange of light and shade, with the 
staff of his silken standard fast in his hand, Marius 
felt as if he were looking, for the first time, on a 
new knighthood or chivalry, just then coming into 
the world. 

It was soon after they left this place, journeying 
now by carriage, that Rome was seen at last, with 
much excitement on the part of our travelers; 
Cornelius, with some others of whom the party now 
consisted, agreeing, chiefly for the sake of Marius, 
to hasten forward, that it might be reached by day- 
light, with a cheerful noise of rapid wheels as they 
passed over the flagstones. But the highest light 
upon the mausoleum of Hadrian had quite gone out, 
and it was dark, before they reached the Flarriiniom 
Gate. The abundant sound of water was the one 
thing that impressed Marius, as they passed down a 
long street, with many open spaces on either hand — 
Cornelius to his military quarters, and Marius to 
the old dwelling-place of his fathers. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD. 

Marius awoke early and passed curiously from 
room to room, noting for more careful inspection by 
and by the rolls of manuscripts. Even greater than 
his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this old 
possession of his ancestors, was his eagerness to look 
out upon Kome itself, as he pushed back curtain and 
shutter and stepped forth in the fresh morning upon 
one of the many balconies, with an oft-repeated 
dream realized at last. He was certainly fortunate 
in the time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan 
world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached 
its perfection in the things of poetry and art — a per- 
fection which indicated but too surely the eve of its 
decline. As in some vast intellectual museum, all 
the manifold products of that world were intact and 
in their places, and with custodians, also, still extant, 
duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And 
at no period of its history had the material Rome 
itself been better worth seeing; lying there, as 
complete as that world of pagan intellect which iV 
represented in every phase of darkness and light; 
the various work of many ages falling harmoniously 
together in it, and as yet untouched save by timci 

155 



156 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

adding the final grace of a rich softness to its cou** 
plex expression. Much which spoke of ages earlier 
than that of ISTerOy the great rebuilder, lingered on, 
antique, quaint, immeasurably venerable, like the 
relics of the medieval city in the Paris of Lewis the 
Fourteenth ; while the work of JSTero's own time had 
come to have the sort of old-world and picturesque 
interest, which the work of Lewis has for ourselves: 
and without stretching a parallel too far, we might 
perhaps liken the architectursil Jl?iesses of the archaic 
Hadrian to the more excellent products of our own 
Gothic revival. The temple of Antoninus and 
Faustina was still fresh in all the majesty of its 
closely arrayed columns of cipolUno ; but, on the 
whole, little had been added under the late and 
present emperors, and during fifty j'ears of public 
quiet, a sober brown and gray had grown apace on 
things. The gilding on the roof of many a temple 
had lost its garishness : cornice and capital ol 
polished marble shone out with all the crisp fresh- 
ness of real flowers, amid the already moldering 
travertine and brickwork, though the birds had built 
freely among them. What Marius then saw was in 
many respects, after all deduction of differences, more 
like the modern Rome than the mention of special 
losses might lead us to suppose ; the Kenaissance, in 
its most ambitious mood and with amplest resources, 
having resumed the ancient classical tradition there, 
with no break or obstruction, as it happened, in any 
▼ery considerable work of the middle age, which had 
here left behind but slig^ht residue of itself. Immedi 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 157 

ately before hira, on the square, steep height, where 
the earliest little old Rome had huddled itself to- 
gether, arose the palace of the Ca9sars. Half-veiling 
the vast substruction of rough, brown stone — line 
upon line of successive ages of buildej's — the trim, 
old-fashioned garden walks, under their closely- 
woven walls of dark glossy foliage, the test of long 
and careful cultivation, wound gradually, among 
choice trees, statues and fountains, distinct and spark- 
ling in the full morning sunlight, to the richly tinted 
mass of pavilions and corridors above, centering in 
the lofty, w^hite-marble dwelling-place of Apollo 
himself. 

How often had Marius looked forward to that first, 
free wandering through Rome, to which he now went 
forth, with a heat in the town sunshine (like a mist of 
fine gold-dust spread through the air) to the height 
of his desire, making the dun coolness of the narrow 
streets welcome enough at intervals. He almost 
feared, as he descended the stair hastily, lest some 
unforeseen accident might snatch the little cup of 
enjoyment from him before he passed the door. It 
had alwavs been in these mornino' wanderinf]:s in 
places new to him. that life seemed to come at its 
fullest, and he could feel his youth, the youth whose 
days of reality he had already begun to count 
jealously, in full possession. So, the grave, pensive 
figure, a figure far fresher than often came across it 
now, moved through the old city, certainly not by 
the most direct course, though eager to join the 
friend of yesterday, to the lodgings of Cornelius. 



158 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Bent as keenly on seeing, as if this first day of 
Marius in Eome were to be also his last, the two 
friends descended along the Vicus TusGuSy with its 
rows of incense-stalls, into the Via Nova, where the 
fashionable people were busy shopping ; and Marius 
saw with much amusement the frizzled heads, then 
a la mode. A glimpse of the marmorata^ the haven 
at the riverside, where specimens of all the precious 
marbles of the world were lying amid great white 
blocks from the quarries of Luna, took his thoughts 
for a moment to his distant home. They visited the 
flower-market, lingering where the coronarii pressed 
on them the newest species, and purchased zinias 
(like painted flowers, thought Marius) then in blos- 
som, to decorate the folds of their togas. Loiter- 
ing to the other side of the Forum, past the great 
Galen's drug-shop, after a glance at the announce- 
ments of the new poems attached to one of the door- 
posts of a famous bookseller, they entered the curi- 
ous library of the Temple of Peace, then a favorite 
resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all 
to see, the Diurnal or Gazette of the day, which 
announced, together with births and deaths, prod- 
igies and accidents, and much mere matter of busi- 
ness, the date and manner of the philosophic 
emperor's joyful return to his people ; and also, 
thereafter, with eminent names faintly disguised, 
what would carry that day's news, in many copies, 
over the provinces — a certain matter concerning the 
great lady, known to be dear to him, whom he had 
left at home. It was a story, with the development 



MARIU8 THE EPICUREAN. 159 

of which the town had indeed for some time past 
amused or edified itself, rallying sufficiently from 
its panic of a year ago, not only to welcome back 
its ruler, but also to relish a clironique scandaleuse * 
so that when, soon after, Marius saw the world's 
wonder, he was already acquainted with the suspi- 
cions which have ever since hung about her name. 
It was twelve o'clock before thev left the Forum, 
having waited in a little crowd to hear the Accensus, 
according to old custom, proclaim the hour of noon- 
day, at the moment when, from the steps of the 
Senate-house, he could seethe sun standing between 
the Rostra and the Gr(^costasis, He exerted for 
that function a strength of voice, which confirmed 
in Marius a judgment the modern visitor may share 
with him, and which he had formed in part the 
night before, noting, as a religious procession passed 
him, how much noise a man and a bov could make, 
though not without a great deal of real music, of 
which, indeed, the Eomans were then as ever pas- 
sionately fond — the judgment, namely, that Roman 
throats and chests must, in some particular way, be 
differently constructed from those of other people. 

Hence the two friends took their wa}^ through 
the Via Flaminia^ almost along the Ime of the 
modern Corso, already bordered w^ith handsome 
villas, turning presently to the left, into the Field- 
of-Mars^ still the playground of Rome. But the 
vast public edifices had grown to be almost continu- 
ous over the grassy expanse, represented now only 
by occasional open spaces of grass and wild-flowers. 



U]{) MAllIUS THE EPICrREAN. 

In one of these a crowd was standing, to watch ^ 
party of athletes who had stripped for exercise. 
Marias had been surprised at the luxurious variety 
of the litters borne through Rome, where no carriage- 
horses were alloweil ; an»l just then one far more 
sumptuous than the rest, with dainty appointments 
of ivory and gold, was carried by, all the town 
pressing eagerly to get a glimpse of its most beauti- 
ful woman, as she passed rapidly. Yes I there was 
the Avonder of the world — the empress Faustina 
herself: Marius could distinguish — could distin- 
guish clearly — the well-known profile between tlie 
floating purple curtains. 

For indeed all Rome Avas ready to burst into 
gayety again, as it awaited with much real atfection, 
hopeful and animated, the return of its emperor; in 
honor of whose ovatio7i various adornments were 
preparing along the streets through which the im- 
perial procession would pass. He had left Home 
htst twelve months before, amid immense srloom. 
The alarm of a barbarian insurrection along the 
whole line of the Danube had come at the moment 
when Rome was panic-stricken by the great pesti- 
lence. 

In fifty years of peace, broken only by that con- 
flict in the east, from which Lucius Yerus had 
brought back the plague among other curiosities, 
war had come to seem but a mere romantic, super- 
annuated incident of bygone history ; and now it 
was almost upon Italian soil. Terrible were the 
reports of the numbers and audacity of the assail- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 161 

ants. Aurelius, as yet untried in war, and under- 
stood by a few only in the whole scope of a really 
great character, was known to the majority of his 
subjects as but a careful administrator, and a, per- 
haps dilettante, student of philosophy. But he was 
also the visible center of government, towards which 
the hearts of a whole people turned, grateful for 
fifty years of public happiness — its good genius, its 
'' Antonine " — whose fragile frame might be fore- 
seen speedily giving way, under the fatigues of 
military life, Avith a disaster like that of the slaughter 
of the legions by Arminius. Prophecies of the 
world's impending conflagration were easily cred- 
ited ; " the secular fire " would descend from 
heaven ; superstitious fear had even demanded a 
human victim. 

Marcus Aurelius, always philosophically consider- 
ate of the humors of other people, and giving way 
to that devout appreciation of every religious pre- 
tension which w^as one of his most characteristic 
habits of mind, had invoked, in aid of the common- 
wealth, not only all native gods, but all foreign 
deities also, however strange — "Help! Help! in the 
ocean space ! " — Multitudes of foreign priests had 
been welcomed to Rome, with their various peculiar 
religious rites. The sacrifices made on this occasion 
were remembered for centuries ; and the starvino- 
poor, at least, had the profit of the flesh of those 
herds of " white bulls," which came into the city 
day after day, to yield the savor of their blood and 
breath to the gods. 



162 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Even after all that, the legions had but followed 
their standards despondently. But prestige, per- 
sonal prestige, the name of emperor, still had its 
magic power over the nations. The mere march of 
the Roman army made an impression on the barba- 
rians. Aurelius and his colleague had hardly reached 
Aquileia when a deputation arrived to ask for peace ; 
and now the two imperial " brothers " were return- 
ing home at leisure ; were waiting, indeed, at a villa 
outside the walls, till the capital had made itself 
readv to receive them. But althou<2:h Rome was 
thus in gay reaction, with much relief, and hopeful- 
ness against the winter, facing itself industriously 
in damask of red and gold, those two enemies were 
still unmistakablv extant : the barbarians of the 
Danube had but been over-awed for a season ; and 
the plague, as we saw when Marius was on his way 
to Rome, was not to depart till it had done a large 
part in the formation of the melancholy picturesque 
of modern Italy — till it had made, or prepared for 
the making, of the Roman Campagna. The old, 
unaffected, really pagan gayety and peace of Anto- 
ninus Pius — that true unconscious humanist — had 
gone forever. And, again and again, throughout 
this day of varied observation, Marius had been re- 
minded, above all else, that he was not merely in 
"the most religious city of the world," as one had 
said, but that Rome had become the romantic home 
of the wildest superstition. It presented itself al- 
most as religious mania, in many an incident of his 
long ramble — incidents to which he gave hip full 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 163 

attention, though contending in some measure with 
a reluctance on the part of his companion, the mo- 
tive of which he did not understand till long after- 
wards. Marius certainly did not allow the reluc- 
tance of Cornelius, in this matter, to deter his own 
curiosity. Had he not come to Rome partly under 
poetic vocation, to receive all those things, the very 
impress of life itself, upon the visual, the imaginative, 
organ, as upon a mirror ? to reflect them, to trans- 
mute them into golden words? He must observe 
that strange medley of superstition, that centuries' 
growth, layer upon layer, of the curiosities of re- 
ligion (one faith jostling another out of its place) at 
least for its picturesque interest ; and as an indiffer- 
ent outsider might ; not too deeply concerned in the 
question which, if any of them, was to be the sur- 
vivor. 

Superficially, at least, the Roman religion, allying 
itself with much diplomatic economy to possible 
rivals, was in possession, as a vast and complex sys- 
tem of usage, intertwining itself with every detail 
of public and private life, attractively enough for 
those who had but " the historic temper," and a taste 
for the past : however much a Lucian might depre- 
ciate it. Roman religion, as Marius knew, had, in- 
deed, been always something to be done, rather than 
something to be thought, or believed, or loved ; 
something to be done in minutely detailed manner, 
at a particular time and place, correctness in all 
which had long been a matter of laborious learning 
with a whole school of ritualists — and, as such, also, 



164 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

now and again, a matter of heroic sacrifice with cer- 
tain exceptionally devout souls, as when Caius Fabius 
Dorso, with his life in his hand, succeeded in passing 
the sentinels of the invading Gauls in order to per- 
form a hereditary sacrifice on the Quirinal, and, 
thanks to the divine protection, had returned in 
safety. So jealous was the distinction between 
sacred and profane, that, in the matter of the ** re- 
garding of days," it had made more than half the 
year a holiday. Aurelius had, indeed, ordained that 
there should be no more than a hundred and thirty- 
five festival days in the year ; but in other respects 
he had followed in the steps of his predecessor, An- 
toninus Pius — commended especially for his religion^ 
his conspicuous devotion to its public ceremonies — 
and whose coins are remarkable for their references 
to the oldest and most hieratic types of Reman 
mythology. Aurelius had succeeded in more than 
healing the old feud between philosophy and re- 
ligion ; displaying himself, in singular combination, 
as at once the most zealous of philosophers and the 
most devout of polytheists, and lending himself, with 
an air of conviction, to all the pageantries of public 
worship. To nis pious recognition of that one orderly 
spirit, which, according to the doctrine of the Stoics, 
diffuses itself through the world, and animates it — a 
recognition which in him took the form of constant 
effort towards an inward likeness thereto, in the 
order and harmony of his own soul — he had added 
a warm personal devotion towards the whole multi- 
tude ef the old national gods, and a great lu^ny new 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 165 

foreign ones besides, by him, at least, not ignobly 
conceived; in something like the way (if the com- 
parison may be reverently made) in which the 
Catholic Church has added the cuUus of the saints 
to its worship of the one Divine Being. 

And to the view of the majority, though the em- 
peror, as the personal center of religion, entertained 
the hope of converting his people to philosophic 
faith, and had even ])ronounced certain public dis- 
courses for their instruction in it, that polytheistic 
devotion was his most striking feature. Philoso- 
phers, indeed, had, for the most part, thought with 
Seneca, " that man need not lift his hands to heaven, 
nor ask the sacristan's leave to put his mouth to the 
ear of an image, in order that his prayer may be 
heard the better." Marcus Aurelius, " a master in 
Israel," knew all that well enough ; yet his outward 
devotion was much more than a concession to popular 
sentiment, and a mere result of that sense of fellow- 
citizenship with others, which had made him again 
and again, under most difficult circumstances, an ex- 
cellent comrade. Those others, too — w^hat were 
they, with all their ignorances, but instruments in 
the administration of that Divine Reason, " from 
end to end sweetly and strongly disposing all 
things ? "—Meantime "Philosophy" itself had as- 
sumed much of what we conceive to be the religious 
character. It had even cultivated the powder and 
the habit of " spiritual direction," the troubled soul 
making recourse in its hour of destitution, or amid 
the distractions of the w orld, to this or that director 



166 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

— j>hilosopho sua — who could really best understand 
it. 

And it had been in vain that the old, discreet and 
grave religion of Rome had set itself, according to 
its proper genius, to prevent or subdue all trouble 
and disturbance in men's souls. In religion, as in 
other things, plebeians had a taste for movement, 
for revolution ; and it had ever been in the most 
populous quarters that religious changes had begun. 
It was to the apparatus of foreign religion, above 
all, that recourse was made in times of public dis- 
quietude or sudden terror ; and in those great re- 
ligious celebrations, before proceeding against the 
barbarians, Aurelius had even restored the solemni- 
ties of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the time of 
Augustus, and made no secret of his worship of that 
goddess, whose temple had been actually pulled down 
in the reign of Tiberius. Her singular, and in many 
ways beautiful, ritual was now popular in Rome. 
And then — what the enthusiasm of the swarming 
plebeian quarters had initiated, was sure to be 
adopted, sooner or later, by women of fashion. A 
blendinof of all the relig-ions of the ancient world 
had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived ; 
had been welcomed, and found their places ; though, 
in truth, with no real security, in any adequate ideal 
of the divine nature in the background of men's 
minds, that the presence of the newcomer should be 
edifying, or even refining. High and low alike, 
addressed themselves to all of them without scruple ; 
confounding them with each other in their prayers, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 167 

and in the old, authorized, threefold veneration 
of their visible images, by flowers, incense, and 
ceremonial lights — those beautiful usages, which the 
church, in her way through the world, ever making 
spoil of the world's goods for the better uses of the 
human spirit, took up and sanctified in her service. 

And certainly " the most religious city in the 
world '- made no secret of its devotion, however 
fantastic. The humblest house had its little chapel 
or shrine set apart for an image, and its lamp : and 
almost every one seemed to have some religious 
function and responsibility. Colleges, composed for 
the most part of slaves, provided for the service of 
the Compitalimi Lares — the gods who presided, re- 
spectiveh^ over the several quarters of the city ; 
and, in one street, Marius witnessed an incident of 
the festival of the patron deity of that quarter ; the 
way being strewn with box, and the houses gay with 
outspread carpets and garlands, as the ancient idol 
was borne through it in procession, arrayed in curious 
and costly robes. Numerous religious, or partly re- 
ligious clubs bad their stated anniversaries, on which 
the members issued with much ceremony from their 
guild-hall, or schola, and traversed the streets of 
Rome, preceded by their sacred banners, like the 
confraternities of the present day, to offer sacrifice 
before some famous image. Black with the perpet- 
ual smoke of lamps and incense, oftenest old and 
ugly, perhaps on that account the more likely to 
listen to the desires of the suffering — had not those 
sacred efligies sometimes given sensible tokens that 



168 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

they were aware ! The image of Fortuna MuUebrig 
in the Via Latina^ had spoken (not once only) and 
declared ; Bene me 7natroncB vidistis riteque dedica- 
stis! The Apollo of Cumse had wept during three 
whole days and nights. The images in the temple 
of Juno Sospita had been seen to sweat. Nay ! there 
was blood— divine blood — in the heart of some of 
them; the images in the Grove of Feronia had 
sweated blood ! 

From one and all Cornelius had turned aside; like 
the " atheist,'' of whom Apuleius tells, he had never 
once put his hand to his lips in passing image or 
sanctuary, and had pai'ted from Marius finally when 
he determined to enter the crowded doorway of a 
temple on their return into the Forum, below the 
Palatine hill, where the mothers were pressino- in, 
Avith swarms of every sort of children, to touch the 
lightning-struck image of the wolf-nurse of Komulus 
—so tender to little ones !— just discernible in its 
dark shrine, amid a blaze of lights. Marius gazed 
after his companion of the day, as he mounted the 
steps to his lodging, singing to himself, as it seemed : 
— Marius could not distinctly catch the words. 

And, as the fresh, rich evening came on, there was 
heard all over Eome, far above a whisper, the w^iole 
town seeming hushed to catch it distinctly, the 
lively, reckless call to " play/' from the sons and 
daughters of foolishness, to those in whom their life 
was still (rvQQW— Donee mrenti canities ahest ! — 
Donee virenti eariitie,^ ahest ! Marius could hnrdly 
doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 169 

And as for himself, slight as was the burden of pos- 
itive moral obligation, with which he had entered 
Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, 
such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed 
him. 



c 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING. 

But ah ! Maecenas is yclad in claye, 
And great Augustus long ygoe is dead, 
And all the worthies liggen \vrapt in lead, 
That matter made for poets on to playe. 

Marcus Aurelius who, though he had little relish 
for them himself, had been ever willing to humor 
the taste of his people for magnificent spectacles, was 
received back to Rome with the lesser honors of the 
Ovation ; conceded by the Senate, so great was the 
public sense of deliverance, with even more than the 
laxity which had become habitual to it under imperial 
rule, for tiiere had been no actual bloodshed in the 
late achievement. Clad in the civic dress of the chief 
Roman magistrate, and with a crown of myrtle upon 
his head, his colleague similarly attired walking be- 
side him, he passed on foot in solemn procession, 
along the Sacred Way up to the Capitol, to offer 
sacrifice to the national gods. The victim, a goodly 
sheep, whose image we may still see, between the 
pig and the ox of the Suovetmirilia^ filleted and 
stoled almost like ancient canons, on a sculptured 
fragment in the Forum, was conducted by the priests, 
clad in rich white vestments, and bearing their sacred 
170 



MARIOS THE EPICUREAN. 171 

utensils of massy gold, immediately behind a com- 
pany of flute-players, led by the great master, or 
conductor, of that day ; visibly tetchy or delighted, 
accordinor as the instruments hB ruled with his 
tuning-rod, rose, more or less perfectly amid the dif- 
ficulties of the way, to the dream of perfect music in 
the soul within him. The vast crowd, in which were 
mingled the soldiers of the triumphant army, now 
restored to wives and children, all alike in holiday 
whiteness, had left their houses early in the fine, 
dry morning, in a real affection for " the father 
of his country," to await the procession ; the two 
princes having spent the preceding night outside the 
walls, in the old Villa of the Itejniblic. Marius, full 
of curiosity, had taken his position with much care ; 
and stood to see the world's masters pass by, at an 
angle from which he could command the view of a 
great part of the processional route, sprinkled with 
fine yellow sand, and carefully guarded from profane 
footsteps. 

The coming of the procession was announced by 
the clear sound of the flutes, heard at length above 
the acclamations of the people — Salve Iin])eTator ! — 
Dii te servent I — shouted in regular time, over the 
hills. It was on the central figure, of course, that 
the whole attention of Marius was fixed from the 
moment when the procession came in sight, preceded 
by the lictors wdth gildedy^^c^.*?, the imperial image- 
bearers, and pages carrying lighted torches ; a band 
of knights, among whom was Cornelius in complete 
military array, following. Amply swathed about 



172 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

in the folds of a ricliiy-worked toga, in a manner 
now long since become obsolete with meaner persons, 
Marius beheld a man of about five and forty yearc 
of age, with prominent ej'^es — eyes, which although 
demurely dotvncast during this essentially religious 
ceremony, were by nature broadly and benignantly 
observant. He w\as still, in the main, as we see him 
in the busts which represent his gracious and courtly 
youth, w^hen Hadrian had playfully called him, not 
Verus^ after his father, but Verissimus, for that 
candor of gaze, and the bland capacity of the brow ; 
which, below the brown hair, clusterino: as thicklv 
as of old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still 
without a trace of the trouble of his lips. It was 
the brow of one who, amid the blindness or per- 
plexity of thepeople about him, understood all things 
clearly; with that dilemma, to which his experience 
so far had brought him, between Chance with meek 
resignation, and a Providence with boundless possi- 
bilities and hope, for him at least distinctly defined. 
That outward serenity, which, as a point of ex- 
pression or manner not unworthy the attention of a 
public minister, he valued so highly (was it not an 
outward symbol of the inward religious serenitj'' it 
had been his constant effort to maintain ?) was in- 
creased to-day, by his sense of the gratitude of bis 
people — that his life had been one of such gifts and 
blessings as made his person seem indeed divine to 
them. Yet the trace of some reserved internal sor- 
row, passing from time to time into an expression 
of effort and fatigue, of loneliness amid the shouting 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 173 

multitude, as if the sagacious hint of one of his 
officers—^' The soldiers can't understand you : they 
don't know Greek "—were applicable generally to 
his relationships with other people, might have been 
read there by the more observant. The nostrils and 
mouth seemed capable even of peevishness; and 
Marius noted in them, as in the hands, and in the 
spare body as a whole, what was new in his expe- 
rience—something of asceticism, as we say— of a 
bodily gymnastic, in which, although it told pleas- 
antly in the clear blue humors of the eye, the flesh 
had scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit. 
It was hardly the expression of " the healthy mind 
in the healthy body," but rather of a sacrifice of the 
body to the soul, its needs and aspirations, that 
Marius seemed to divine in this assiduous student of 
the Greek sages— a sacrifice, indeed, far beyond the 
demands of their very saddest philosophy of life. 

Dignify thyself, with modesty and simplicity for 
thine ornaments .^— had been a maxim with this dainty 
and hio*h-bred Stoic ; who still thought manners a true 
part of inorals, according to the old sense of the term, 
and who regrets, now and again, that he cannot con- 
trol his thoughts equally well with his countenance. 
That outward composure was deepened during the 
solemnities of this day by an air of pontifical ab- 
stractedness ; which though very far from being 
pride, and a sort of humility rather, yet gave, to him- 
self, an aspect of unapproachableness, and to his 
whole proceeding, in which every minutest act was 
considered^ the character of a ritual Certainl), 



174 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, 

there was no haughtiness, social, moral, or philo. 
sophic even, in Aurelius, who had realized, under 
more trying conditions perhaps than any one before 
him, that no element of humanity could be alien to 
him. Yet, as he Avalked to-day, the center of ten 
thousand observers, with eyes discreetly fixed on 
the ground, veiling his head at times and muttering 
very rapidly the words of the *' supplications," there 
was something which many a spectator must have 
noted, again as a new thing ; for, unlike his predeces- 
sors, Aurelius took all that with absolute seriousness. 
The doctrine of the sanctity of kings, that in the 
words of Tacitus, Princes are as Gods — Princijjes 
instar deoru7)i esse, — seemed to have taken anew and 
true sense. For Aurelius, indeed, the old legend of 
his descent from Numa — from Numa who had talked 
with the gods — meant much. Attached in very 
early years to the service of the altars, like many 
another noble youth, he was " observed to perform 
all his sacerdotal functions with a constancy and ex- 
actness unusual at that age ; was soon a master of 
the sacred music ; and had all the forms and cere- 
monies by heart." And now, as the emperor, who 
had not only a vague divinity about his person, but 
was actually the chief religious functionary of the 
state, recited from time to time the formulas of in- 
vocation, he needed not the help of the prompter, 
or cerevioniariusj who then approached, to assist him 
by whispering the appointed words in his ear. It 
was that pontifical collectedness which then im- 
pressed itself on Marias as the leading outward 



MARIU.S THE EPICUREAN. 175 

characteristic of Aurelius ; and to him alone, per^ 
haps, in that vast crowd of observers, it was no 
strange thing, but a thing he had understood from 
of old. 

Some fanciful writers have assig-ned the origin of 
these triumphal processions to the mythic pomps of 
Dionysus, after his conquests in the East ; the very 
Avord triumph, being, according to this supposition, 
only Thriamhos — the Dionysiac Hymn. And cer- 
tainly the younger of the two imperial " brothers," 
who, with the effect of a strong contrast, walked be- 
side Aurelius, and shared the honors of the day, 
might well have reminded many of the delicate 
Greek god of flowers and wine. This new^ con- 
queror of the East was now^ about thirty-six years 
old, but with his puuctilious care for all his advan- 
tages of person, andTiis soft curling beard powdered 
with gold, looked many years younger. It was one 
of the best fruits of the more genial element in the 
wisdom of Aurelius that, amid very difficult circum- 
stances, he had known throughout life how to act 
in union with persons of character very different 
from his own ; to be more than loyal to the col- 
league, the younger brother in empire, he had too 
lightly taken to himself, five years before, then an 
uncorrupt youth, " skilled in manly exercises and 
fitted for war." When Aurelius thanks the gods 
that a brother had fallen to his lot, whose character 
was a stimulus to the proper care of his own, one sees 
that that could only have happened by way of an ex- 
ample, warning him against insidious faults. But it 



i76 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

is with sincere Jiraiability that the imperial writer, 
who was indeed little used to be ironical, adds that 
the lively r.espect and affection of the junior had 
often "gladdened" him. To be able to make his 
use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless 
or poisonous — that, was one of the practical successes 
of his philosophy ; and his people noted, with a 
blessing, the concord of the two Atigusti. 

The younger, certainly, had to the full that charm 
of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may 
defy for a long time extravagant or erring habits 
of life ; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, and 
firm, which seemed unassociable with any form of 
self -tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle 
of some young hound or roe, such as human beings 
invariably like to stroke — with all the goodliness, 
that is, of the finer sort of animalism, though still 
wholly animal. It was the charm of the blond head, 
the unshrinking gaze, the warm tints : — neither more 
nor less than one may see every English summer, 
in youth, manly enough, and with the stuff in it 
which makes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural 
kinship it seems to have with playthings and gay 
flowers. Lucius Yerus, indeed, had had a more than 
womanly fondness for fond things, which had made 
the atmosphere of the old cit}^ of Antioch, heavy 
with centuries of voluptuousness, a poison to him : he 
had come to love his delicacies best out of season, 
and would have gilded the very flowers. But, with 
a marvelous power of self-obliteration, the elder 
brother at the capital had directed his procedure 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 177 

successfully, and allowed him, now also the husband 
of his daughter Lucilla, the credit of a conquest, 
though Yerus had certainly not returned a victor 
over himself. He had returned, as we know, with 
the plague in his company, along with many another 
strange creature of his folly ; and when the people 
saw him publicly feeding his favorite horse Fleet 
with almonds and sweet grapes, wearing the animaPs 
image in gold, and finally building him a tomb, they 
felt, with some unsentimental misgiving, that he 
might revive the manners of Nero. — What if, in the 
chances of war, he should survive the protecting 
genius of that elder brother ? 

He was all himself to-day : and it was with much 
wistful curiosity that Marius regarded him. For 
Lucius Yerus was, indeed, but the highly expressive 
type of a class — the true son of his father, adopted 
by Hadrian. Lucius Yerus the elder, also, had had 
that same strange capacity for misusing the adorn- 
ments of life, with a masterly grace ; as if such mis- 
using were, in truth, the quite adequate occupation 
of an intelligence, powerful, but distorted by cynical 
philosophy or some disappointment of the heart. It 
was almost a sort of genius, of which there had been 
instances in the imperial purple : it was lo ascend 
the throne, a few years later, in the person of one, 
now a hopeful little lad in the palace ; and it had its 
following, of course, among the wealthy youth of 
Rome, who concentrated a very considerable force 
of shrewdness and tact upon minute details of attire 
and manner, as upon the one thing needful. Cer- 

(2 



178 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

tainly, flowers were pleasant to the eye. Such things 
had even their sober use, as making the outside of 
human life superficially attractive, and thereby pro- 
moting the first steps towards friendship and social 
amity. But what precise place could there be for 
Yerus, and his charm, in that Wisdom, that Order 
of Reason " reaching from end to end, sweetly and 
strongly disposing all things ; " from the vision of 
which Aurelius came down, so tolerant of persons 
like him — a vision into which Marius also was com- 
petent to enter. Yet noting his actual perfection 
after his kind, his undeniable achievement of the 
select, in all minor things, Marius felt, with some 
suspicion of himself, that he entered into, and could 
understand, Lucius Yerus too. There was a voice in 
that theorv which he had brouo-ht to Rome with 
him, which whispered *' nothing is either great nor 
small ;" as there were times in which he could have 
thought that, as the "grammarian's," or the artist's 
ardor of soul may be satisfied by the perfecting of 
the theory of a sentence or the adjustment of two 
colors, so his own life also might have been filled by 
an enthusiastic quest after perfection — say, in the 
flowering and folding of a toga. 

The emperors had burned incense before the image 
of Jupiter, arrayed in his most gorgeous apparel, 
amid sudden shouts from the people of Salve Im- 
perator ! turned now from the living princes to the 
deity, as they discerned his countenance through the 
great opened door. The imperial brothers had de- 
posited their crowns of myrtle on the richly em- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 179 

broidered lap-cloth of the image ; and, with their 
chosen guests, had sat down to a public feast in the 
temple itself. And then followed, what was, after 
all, the great event of the day ; an appropriate dis- 
course — a discourse ahnost wholly de contemphi 
rnundi — pronounced in the presence of the assembled 
Senate, by the emperor Aurelius ; who had thus, on 
certain rare occasions, condescended to instruct his 
people, with the double authority of a chief pontiff 
and a laborious student of philosophy. In those 
lesser honors of the ovation^ there had been no 
attendant slave behind the emperors, to make mock 
of their effulgence as they went ; and it was as if, 
timorous, as a discreet philosopher might be, of a 
jealous Nemesis, he had determined himself to pro- 
test in time against the vanity of all outward success. 
It w^as in the vast hall of the Curia Julia that the 
Senate was assembled to hear the emperor's dis- 
course. A crowd of high-bred youths, who had near 
relations among its members, were idling around on 
the steps before the doors, in the marvelous toilets 
Marius had noticed in the Via J^ova ; in attendance, 
as usual, to learn by observation all the delicacies 
of the senatorial procedure. Marius had already 
some acquaintance among them, and passing on 
found himself suddenly in the presence of what was 
still the most august assembly the world had seen. 
Under Aurelius, ever full of veneration for this 
ancient traditional guardian of public religion, the 
Senate had recovered all its old dignity and inde- 
pendence. Among its members, many hundreds m 



180 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

number, as the grandest of them all, Marius noted 
the great sophists or rhetoricians of the day, in all 
their magnificence. The antique character of their 
attire, and the ancient mode of wearing it, still 
surviving with them, added to the imposing char- 
acter of their persons, as they sat, with their staves 
of ivory in their hands, on their curule chairs (almost 
the exact pattern of the chair, still in use in the 
Roman church when a Bishop pontificates at the 
divine offices) '' tranquil and unmoved, with a majesty 
that seemed divine," as Marius thought, like the old 
Gaul of the Invasion. The rays of the early Novem- 
ber sunset slanted full upon the audience, and com- 
pelled the officers of the Court to draw the purple 
curtains over the windows, adding to the solemnity 
of the scene. In the depth of those warm shadows, 
surrounded by her noble ladies, the empress Faustina 
was seated to listen. The beautiful Greek statue of 
Victory, which ever since the days of Augustus had 
presided over the assemblies of the Senate, had been 
brought into the hall, and placed near the chair of the 
emperor ; who, after rising to perform a brief sacri- 
ficial service in its honor, bowing reverently to the 
assembled fathers left and right, took his seat and 
began to speak. 

There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the 
very simplicity or triteness of the theme ; as it were 
the very quintessence of all the old Roman epitaphs ; 
of all that was monumental in that city of tombs, 
layer upon layer of dead things and people. As if 
in the very fervor of disillusion, he seemed to be 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 181 



fvoj'^— — 



composing — warc^p i7i'.Ypa<pa^^ ypoviov xai llXiov tOi 

the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples— nay ! 
the very epitaph of the living Rome itself. The 
grandeur of the ruins of Eome— heroism in ruin :— 
it was under the influence of an imaginative anticipa- 
tion of that, that he appeared to be speaking. And 
thougli the impression of the actual greatness of 
Pwome on that day was but enhanced by this strain 
of contempt, falling with an accent of pathetic con- 
viction from the emperor himself, and gaining from 
his pontifical pretensions the authority of a religious 
intimation, yet the curious interest of the discourse 
lay in this, that Marias, as he listened, seemed to 
foresee a grass-grown Forum, the broken ways of the 
Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupa- 
tion : and this impression connected itself with what 
be had already noted of an actual change that was 
coming over Italian scenery. Throughout, he could 
trace something of a humor into which Stoicism at 
all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry, Ahase your- 
selves ! With the almost inhuman impassibility of 
one who had thought too closely on the paradoxical 
aspect of the love of posthumous fame, with the 
ascetic pride which lurks, in spite of its poetry, in all 
Platonism, resultant from its opposition of the seen 
to the unseen, as falsehood to truth -the imperial 
Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of the 
middle age, was ready, in no friendly humor, to 
mock, there in its narrow bed, the corpse, w^hich had 
made so much of itself in life. Marius could but 
contrast all that with his own Oyrenaic eagerness, 



1S2 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

just then, to taste and see and touch ; reflecting on 
the opposite issues deducible from the same text. 
''' The world without and within me flows away like 
a river ; " he had said, " therefore let me make the 
most of what is here and now." — " The world and 
the thinker upon it, are consumed like a flame ; " 
said Aurelius, " therefore let us turn away our eves 
from vanity ; and renounce and withdraw ourselves 
alike from all affections." He seemed tacitly to claim 
it as a sort of personal dignity, that he was verv 
familiarly versed in that view of things, and could 
discern death's head everv where. Xow and ao^ain, 
Marius was reminded of the sajnng that " with the 
Stoics all people are the vulgar save themselves : " 
and at times the orator seemed to have forgotten his 
audience, and to be speaking only to himself. 

*' Art thou in love with men's praises, get thee into 
the very soul of them, and see ! — see what judges they 
be, even in those matters which concern themselves. 
Wouldst thou have their praises after death, bethink 
thee, that they who shall come hereafter, and with 
whom thou wouldst survive bv thv o:reat name, will 
be but as these, whom here thou hast found so hard 
to live with. For of a truth, his soul who is aflutter 
upon renown after death, presents not this aright to 
itself, that of all whose memory he would have each 
one will likewise very quickly depart, and thereafter, 
again, he also who shall receive that from him, until 
memory herself be put out, as she journeys on by 
means of such as are themselves on the wing but for 
a while, and are extinguished ia their turn. — Making 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 183 

80 much of those, thou \Yi\t never see ! It is as if 
thou wouldst have had those who were before thee 
discourse fair things concerning thee. 

" To him, indeed, whose wit hath been whetted by 
true doctrine, that well-worn sentence of Homer suf- 
ficeth, to guard him against regret and fear — 

Like the race of leaves 
The race of man is : — 

The wind in autumn strows 
The earth with old leaves : then the spring the woods with 
new endows — 

Leaves ! little leaves ! — thy children, thy flatterers, 
thine enemies ! Leaves in the wind, those who would 
devote thee to darkness, who scorn or miscall thee 
here, even as they also whose great fame shall outlast 
them. For all these, and the like of them, are born 
indeed in the spring season — sap<>^ iuiyiY'^srai wpri — and 
soon a wind hath scattered them, and thereafter the 
wood peopleth itself again with another generation of 
leaves. And what is common to all of them is but the 
littleness of their liv^es : and yet wouldst thou love 
and hate, as if these things should continue forever. 
In a little while tlnne eyes also will be closed, and he 
on whom thou perchance hast leaned thyself be him- 
self a burden upon another. 

*' Bethink thee often of the sv/iftness with which 
the things that are, or are even now coming to be, 
are swept past thee : that the very substance of them 
is but the perpetual motion of water ; that there is 
almost nothing which continueth : and that bottom- 
less depth of time, so close at thy side. Folly 1 to b^ 



184: MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

lifted up, or sorrowful, or anxious, by reason of 
things like these ! Think of infinite matter, and thy 
portion — how tiny a particle of it ! of infinite time, 
and thine own brief point there ; of destiny, and the 
jot thou art in it ; and yield thyself readily to the 
wheel of Clotho, to spin thee into what web she 
will. 

" As one casting a ball from his hand, the nature 
of things hath had its aim with every man, not as to 
the ending only, but the first beginning of his course, 
and passage thither. And hath the ball any profit of 
its rising, or loss as it descendeth again, or in its fall ? 
or the bubble, as it groweth or breaketh on the air? 
or the tiame of the lamp, from the beginning to the 
ending of its brief history ? 

" All but at this present that future is, in which 
nature, who disposeth all things in order, will trans- 
form whatsoever thou now seest, fashioning from its 
substance somewhat else, and therefrom somewhat 
else in its turn, lest the world should grow old. We 
are such stufi^ as dreams are made of — disturbing 
dreams. Awake, then ! and see thy dream as it is, 
in comparison with that erewhile it seemed to thee. 

" And for me, especially, it were well to mind those 
many mutations of empire in time past ; therein peep- 
ing also upon the future, which must needs be of like 
species with what hath been, continuing ever within 
the rhythm and number of things which really are ; 
so that in fortv vears one mav note of man and his 
ways little less than in a thousand. Ah ! from this 
higher place, look we down upon the shipwrecks and 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. JSS 

the calm ! Consider, for example, how the world 
went, under the emperor Vespasian. They are 
married and given in marriage, they breed children ; 
love hath its way with them ; they heap up riches 
for others or for themselves; they are murmuring at 
things as then they are ; they are seeking for great 
place ; crafty, flattering, suspicious, waiting upon the 
death of others — festivals, business, war, sickness, 
dissolution : and now their whole life is no longer 
any whereat all. Pass on to the reign of Trajan : all 
thino's continue the same : and that life also is no 
longer anywhere at all. Ah ! but look again, and 
consider, one after another, as it were the sepuloliral 
inscriptions of all peoples and times, according to one 
pattern — What multitudes, after their utmost striv- 
ing — a little afterwards ! — were dissolved again into 
theii dust. 

" Think again of life as it was far off in the old 
time ; as it must be when we shall be gone ; as it is 
now among the wild heathen. How many have never 
heard your names and mine, or will soon forget them. 
How soon mav those who shout my name to-dav 
begin to revile it, because glory, and the memory of 
men, and all things beside, are but vanity — a sand- 
heap under the senseless wind, the barking of dogs, 
the quarreling of children, weeping incontinently 
upon their laughter. 

" This hasteth to be ; that other to have been : 
of that which is now becoming, even now somewhat 
hath been extinguished. And wilt thou make thy 
treasure of any one of those things? It were as if 



186 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

one set his love upon tlie swallow, as it passeth out 
of sig-bt throuo-h the air ! 

" Bethink thee often, in all contentions public and 
private, of those whom men have remembered by 
reason of their anger and vehement spirit — those 
famous rages, and the occasions of them — the great 
fortunes, and misfortunes, of men's strife of old. 
What are they all now, and the dust of their battles ? 
Dust and ashes indeed ; a fable, a mythus, or not so 
much as that. Yes ! keep those before thine eyes 
who took this or that, the like of which happeneth 
to thee, so hardly ; were so querulous, so agitated. 
And where ag-ain are thev ? Wouldst thou have it 
not otherwise with thee ? 

" Consider how^ quickly all things vanish away — 
their bodily structure into the general substance of 
things; the very memory of them into that great 
gulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah ! 'tis on a tiny 
space of earth thou art creeping through life — a 
pigm}" soul carrying a dead body to its grave. Con- 
sider all this with thyself, and let nothing seem great 
to thee. 

" Let death put thee upon the consideration both 
of thy body and thy soul — what an atom of all 
matter hath been distributed to thee ; w^hat a little 
particle of the universal mind. Turn thy body about, 
and consider what thing it is, and that which old 
age, and lust, and the languor of disease can make 
of it. Or come to its substantial and causal qualities, 
its very type : contemplate that in itself, apart from 
the accidents of matter, and then measure also the 



MARTUS THE EPICUREAN. 187 

span of time for which the nature of things, at the 
longest, will maintain that special type. Nay ! in 
the very principles and first constituents of things 
corruption hath its part — so much dust, humor, 
stench, and scraps of bone ! Consider that thy 
marbles are but the earth's callosities, th>" gold and 
silver li^feeceH; this silken robe but a worm's bed- 
ding, and thy purple an unclean fish. Ah ! and thy 
life's breath is not otherwise ; as it passeth out of 
matters like these, into the like of them again, 

"For the one soul in things, taking matter like 
wax into its hands, molds and remolds — how hastily! 
— beast, and plant, and the babe, in turn : and that 
u'hich dieth hath not slipped out of the order of 
nature, but, remaining therein, hath also its changes 
there, disparting into those elements of which nature 
herself, and. thou too, art compacted. She changes 
without murmuring. The oaken chest falls to pieces 
with no more complaining than wlien the carpenter 
fitted it together. If one told thee certainly that on 
the morrow thou shouldst die, or at the farthest on 
the day after, it would be no great matter to thee to 
die on the dav after to-morrow, rather than to- 
morrow. Strive to think it a thing no greater that 
thou wilt die — not to-morrow, but a year, or two 
years, or ten years from to-day. 

" I find that all things are now as the\^ were in 
the da\^s of our buried ancestors — all things sordid 
in their elements, trite by long usage and yet ephem 
eral. How ridiculous, then, how like a countr^nnan 
in town, is he, who wonders at aught. Doth the 



188 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

sameness, the repetition of i'he public shows, weary 
thee ? Even so doth that likeness of events make the 
spectacle of the world a vajDid one. And so must it 
be Avith thee to the end. For the wheel of the world 
hath ever the same motion, upward and downward, 
from generation to generation. When, when, shall 
time give place to eternity ? 

" If there be things which trouble thee thou canst 
put them away, inasmuch as they have their being 
but in thine own notion conceriiing them. Consider 
what death is, and how, if one does but detach from 
it the notions and appearances that hang about it, 
resting the eye upon it as in itself it really is, it 
must be thought of but as an effect of nature, and 
that man but a child whom an effect of nature shall 
affright. Nay ! not function and effect of nature, 
only ; but a thing profitable also to herself. 

'' To cease from action — the ending of thine effort 
to think and do : — there is no evil in that. Turn thy 
thought to the ages of man's life, — boyhood, youth, 
maturity, old age : the change in every one of those 
also is a dying, but evil nowhere. Thou climbedst 
into the ship, thou hast made thy voyage and 
touched the shore: go forth now! Beit into some 
other life ; the divine breath is everywhere, even 
there. Be it into forgetfulness forever; at least 
thou wilt rest from the beating of sensible images 
upon thee, from the passions which pluck thee this 
way and that like an unfeeling toy, from those long 
marches of the intellect, from thy toilsome ministry 
to the flesh. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 189 

" Art thou yet more than flust and ashes and bare 
bone — a name only, or not even that name, which 
also is but whispering and a resonance, kept alive 
from mouth to mouth of dying ai)jects who have 
hardly known themselves ; how much less thee, dead 
so long ago ! 

" When thou lookest upon a wise man, a lawyer, 
a captain of war, think upon another gone. When 
thou seest thine own face in the glass, call up there 
before thee one of thine ancestors — one of those old 
Caesars. Lo ! everywhere, they double before thee ! 
Thereon, let the thought occur to thee : — And 
where are they? anywhere at all, forever? And 
thou, thyself — how long ? Art thou blind to that 
thou art — thy matter, thy function, how temporal — 
the nature of thy business? Yet tarry, at least, till 
thou hast assimilated even these thino-s to thine own 
proper essence, as a quick fire turneth into heat and 
light whatsoever be cast upon it. 

'' As words once in use are antiquated with us, so 
is it with the names that were once on all men's lips 
— Camillus, Yolesus, Leonnatus : then, in a little 
while, Scipioand Cato, and then Augustus, and then 
Hadrian, and then Antoninus Pius. How many 
great physicians who lifted wise brows at other men's 
sick-beds, have sickened, and died ? Those wise 
Chaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another 
man^ last hour, have them'selves been taken by sur- 
prise. Ay ! and all those others, in their pleasant 
places- -those who doated on a Capreae like Tiberius, 
on their gardens, on the baths ; Pythagoras find 



190 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Socrates, who reasoned so closely upon immortality ; 
Alexander, who used the lives of others as though 
his own should last forever — he and his raule-driver 
alike now I — one upon another. Weil-nigh the 
whole court of Antoninus is extinct. Panthea and 
Perganius sit no longer beside the sepulcher of their 
lord. The watchers over Hadrian's dust have slipped 
from his sepulcher. — It were jesting to stay longer. 
Did they sit tiiere still, would the dead feel it? or 
feeling it, be glad ; or glad, hold those watches for- 
ever ? The time must come when they too shall be 
aged men and aged women, and decease, and fail 
from their places ; and what shift w^ere there then 
for imperial service ? This too is but the breath of 
the tomb, and a skinful of dead men's blood. 

*' Think again of those inscriptions, which belong 
^ot to one soul only, but to whole families — 'itryarofs 
TOO uMon /'£vofn— he was the last of his race. Nay ! of 
the burial of whole cities — Helice^ Pompeii j' of 
others, whose very burial-place is unknown. 

*' Thou hast been a citizen in this wide citv. — 
Count not for how long, nor complain ; since that 
which sends thee hence is no unrighteous judge, no 
tyrant ; but Nature, w^ho brought thee hither ; as 
when a player leaves the stage at the bidding of the 
conductor who hired hirn. Sayest thou, * I have 
not played five acts.' True I but in human life, 
three acts only make sometimes a complete play. 
That is the composers business, not thine. Retire 
with a good will ; for that too hath, perchance, a 
good will which dismisseth thee from thy part." 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 191 

The discourse ended almost in darkness, the 
evening liaving set in somewhat suddenly, with a 
heavy fall of snow. The torches which had been 
made ready to do him a useless honor were of real 
service now, as the emperor was solemnly conducted 
home ; one man rapidlv catching- light from another 
— a long stream of moving lights across the white 
Forum, up the great stairs, to the palace. And, in 
effect, that night winter began, the hardest that had 
been known for a lifetime. The wolves came from 
the mountains; and, led by the carrion scent, de- 
voured the dead bodies w^iich had been hastily buried 
during the plague, and, emboldened by their meal, 
crept, before the short day was w^ell past, over the 
walls of the farmyards of the Campagna. The 
eaoles were seen drivino: the flocks of the smaller 
birds across the w^intry sky. Only, in the city itself 
the winter was all the brighter for the contrast, 
among those who could pay for light and w^armth. 
The habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of 
all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and 
eagles, for presents at the Saturnalia ; and at no 
time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed 
more lustrously veliow and red. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

fHE ^' MISTRESS AND MOTHER " OF PALACES, 

After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was al« 
ready at work, softenino- leaf and bud, as you might 
feel bv a faint sweetness in the air ; but he did his 
work behind an evenly white sky, against which 
the abode of the Caesars, its c^^presses and bronze 
roofs, seemed like a picture in beautiful but melan- 
choly color, as Marius climbed the long flights of 
steps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. 
Attired in the newest mode, his legs wound in dainty 
fasciae of white leather, with the heav\v gold ring of 
the ingenuus^ and in his toga of ceremony, he re- 
tained still all his country fi^eshness of complexion. 
The eves of the " o^olden vouth " of Rome were 
upon him as the chosen friend of Cornelius, and the 
destined servant of the emperor ; but not jealouslv. 
In spite of, perhaps partly because of, his habitual 
reserve of manner, he had become '' the fashion," 
even among those who felt instinctively the irony 
which lay beneath that remarkable self-possession, 
as of one taking all things with a difference from 
other people, perceptible in voice, in expression, and 
even in his dress. It was, in truth, the air of one 

who, entering vividly into life, and relishing to the 
192 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 193 

full the delicacies of its intercourse, yet feels all the 
while, from the point of view of an ideal philosophy, 
that he is but conceding reality to suppositions, 
choosing of his own will to walk in a day-dream, of 
the illusiveness of which he, at least, is aware. 

Marius had to wait in the house of the chief 
chamberlain for the due moment of admission to 
the emperor's presence. He was admiring the pecul- 
iar decoration of the walls, colored like rich old red 
leather (in the midst of one of them Avas depicted, 
under a trellis of fruit one might have gathered, the 
figure of a woman knocking at a door with wonder- 
ful reality of perspective), when the summons came ; 
and in a few minutes, the etiquette of the imperial 
household being still simple, he had passed the 
curtains which divided the central hall of the palace 
into three parts — three degrees of approach to the 
sacred person, and was speaking to Aurelius himself ; 
not in Greek, in which the emperor oftenest con- 
versed with the learned, but more familiarly, in 
Latin, adorned however, or disfigured, by many a 
Greek phrase ; as, now and again, French phrases 
have made the adornment of fashionable English. 
It was wirti real kindliness that Marcus Aurelius 
looked upon Marius, as a youth of great attainments 
in Greek letters and philosophy ; and he liked also 
his serious expression, being, as we know, a believer 
in the doctrine of physiognomy — that (as he puts it) 
not love only, but every other nffection of man's 
soul, looks out very p^aiii'v from the window of the 
eves. 



194 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

It was a very ancient-looking apartment in which 
Marius found himself, richlv adorned with the favor- 
ite toys of two or three generations of imperial col- 
lectors, now finally revised by the high connoisseur- 
ship of the Stoic emperor himself, though destined 
not ranch longer to remain together there. It is the 
repeated boast of Aurelius that he had learned from 
old Antoninus Pius to maintain authority without the 
constant use of guards, in a robe woven by the hand- 
maids of his own consort, without processional lights 
and images, and " that a prince may shrink himself 
almost into the figure of a private gentleman." And 
yet, again as at the first sight of him, Marius was 
struck by the profound religiousness of the surround- 
ings of the imperial presence. The effect might have 
been partly due to the very simplicity, the discreet and 
scrupulous simplicity, of the central figure in this 
splendid abode ; but Marius could not forget that he 
saw before him not only the head of the Roman re- 
ligion, but one who might actually have claimed 
something like divine worship, had he cared to do so. 
Though the fantastic pretensions of Caligula had 
brought some contempt on that claim, which had 
become almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, 
yet, from Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had 
seemed to surround the Caesars even in this life ; and 
the peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a cere- 
monious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical 
calling, and a philosopher whose mystic speculation 
surrounded him with a saintly halo, had resorted to 
his person, without his intending it, some of that 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 195 

divine prerogative and prestige. Though he would 
never allow the immediate dedication of altars to 
himself, yet the image of his Genius — his spirituality, 
or celestial counterpart — was placed among those of 
the divinized princes of the past ; and his family, 
including Faustina and the young Commodus, was 
spoken of as the holy or divine house. Many a Roman 
courtier agreed with the barbarian chief, who, after 
contemplating one of the predecessors of Aurelius, 
withdrew from his presence with the exclamation — 
" I have seen Gods to-day ! '' The very roof of his 
house, rising into a pediment or gable, like that of the 
sanctuary of a god, the laurels on either side its door- 
way, the chaplet of oak-leaves above, seemed to desig- 
nate the place for religious veneration. And not- 
withstanding all this, the household of Aurelius was 
singularly modest, with none of the wasteful expense 
of palaces after the fashion of Lewis the Fourteenth ; 
the palatial dignity being felt only in a peculiar order- 
liness, the absence of all that was casual of vulgarity 
and discomfort. A merely official residence of his 
predecessors, the Palatine had become the favorite 
dwelling-place of Aurelius ; its many-colored memories 
suiting, perhaps, his pensive character, and the crude 
splendors of I^ero and Hadrian being now subdued 
by time. The windowless Roman house must have 
had much of what to a modern would be gloom. 
How did the children, one wonders, endure houses 
with so little escape for the eye into the world out- 
side ? Aurelius, who had altered little else, choosing 
to live there m all the intimacy of home, had shifted. 



196 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

and made the most of, the level lights, and broken 
out a quite medieval window here and there, and 
the clear daylight, fully appreciated by his youthful 
visitor, made pleasant shadows among*^tlie objects of 
the imperial collection ; as some of them, by reason 
of their Greek simplicity and grace, themselves shone 
out like spaces of a purer, early light, amid the splen- 
dors of the later Koman manufacture. 

^ Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who 
did not sleep enough, he was abounding and bright 
to-day, after one of those pitiless headaches, which 
since boyhood had been the " thorn in his side,'' 
challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to for- 
tify one in humble endurances. At the first moment, 
to Marius, remembering the spectacle of the emperor 
in ceremony, it was almost bewildering to be in private 
conversation with him. There was much in the phil- 
osophy of Aurelius— much consideration of mankind 
at large, of great bodies, aggregates and generalities, 
after the Stoic manner— which, on a nature less rich 
than his, might have acted as an inducement to care 
for people in inverse proportion to their nearness to 
him. That has sometimes been the result of Stoic 
cosmopolitanism. Aurelius, however, determined to 
beautify by all means, great or little, a doctrine which 
had in it some potential sourness, had brought all the 
quickness of his intelligence, and long years of obser- 
vation, to bear on the conditions of social intercourse. 
Fie had early determined '' not to make business an 
excuse to decline the offices of humanity -not to 
pretend to be too much occupied with important 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 197 

affairs to concede what life with others may hourly 
demand • '* and with such success, that, in an age 
which made much of the finer points of that inter- 
course, it was felt that the mere honesty of his con- 
versation was more pleasing than other men's flattery. 
His agreeableness to his young visitor to-day was, in 
truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had made 
of Lucius Verus reallv a brother — the wisdom of not 
being exigent with men, any more than with fruit- 
trees (it is his own favorite figure) beyond their 
nature : and there was another person, still nearer to 
him reoardino^ whom this wisdom became a marvel 
of equitv — of charitv. 

Aft/ ^ 

The center of a group of princely children, in the 
same apartment with Aurelius, with all the I'efined 
intimacy of a modern home, sat the empress Faus- 
tina, warming her hands over a tire. With her long 
lingers lighted up red by the glowing coals of the 
brazier, Marius looked close upon the most beauti- 
ful woman in the world, who was also the great 
paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. As 
hasT)een truly said of the numerous representations 
of her in art, so in life, she had the air of one rest- 
less to enter into conversation with the first comer. 
She had certainly the power of stimulating a very 
ambiguous sort of curiosity about herself. And 
Marius found this enigmatic point in her expression, 
that even after seeing her many times he could never 
precisely recall her features in absence. The lad of 
six years, but looking older, who stood beside her, 
impatiently plucking a rose to pieces over the hearth, 



198 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

was, in outward appearance, bis father — the young 
Verissimus — over again ; but with a certain femi- 
nine length of feature, and with all his mother's 
alertness, or license, of gaze. 

Yet rumor knocked at every door and window of 
the imperial house regarding the adulterers who 
knocked at them, or quietly left their lovers* gar- 
lands there. AVas not chat likeness of the husband, 
in the boy beside her, really the effect of a shame- 
ful magic, in which a bath of the blood of the mur- 
dered gladiator, his true father, had been an ingre- 
dient ? Were the tricks for deceiving husbands 
which the Roman poet describes, really hers, and 
her household an efficient school of all the arts of 
furtive love? Or, was the husband too aware, like 
every one besides? AYere certain sudden deaths 
which happened there, really the work of apoplexy, 
or the plague ? 

The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumors 
were meant to penetrate, was however faithful to 
his sanguine and optimist philosophy, to his deter- 
mination that the world should be to him simply as 
the higher reason preferred to conceive it ; and the 
life's journey Aurelius had made so far, though in- 
volving much moral and intellectual loneliness, had 
been ever in affectionate and helpful contact with 
other wayfarers, very unlike himself. From the 
da3^s of his earliest childhood in the Lateran gardens, 
he seemed to himself, blessing the gods for it after 
a deliberate survey, to have been always surrounded 
by relatives, friends, and servants, of exceptional 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 199 

rirtue. From the great Stoic idea, that all men are 
fellow-citizens of one city, he had derived a ten- 
derer, more equitable estimate than is common 
among Stoics, of men's and women's eternal short- 
coming's. C'onsiderations that mi"ht tend to the 
sweetening of his temper it was his daily care to 
store away, with a kind of philosophic pride in the 
thought that no one took more good-naturedly than 
he the *' oversights " of his neighbors. For had not 
Plato taught (it was not paradox, but simple truth 
of experience) that if people sin, it is because they 
know no better, and are " under the necessity of 
their own ignorance." Hard to himself, he seemed 
at times to decline too softly upon unworthy people. 
Really, he came thereby upon many a useful instru- 
ment ; and, as regards the enijiress Faustina, he 
would seem at least to have kept her, by a constrain- 
ing affection, from becoming all that most people 
have believed her ; and certainly won in her (we 
must take him at his word in the " Thoughts," 
abundantly confirmed by the letters, on both sides, 
in his correspondence with Cornelius Fronto) a con- 
solation for himself, the more secure, perhaps, for 
being- misknown of others. Was the secret of her 
actual blamelessness, after all, with him, who has at 
last screened her name? At all events, the one 
thing quite certain about her, besides her extraor- 
dinary beauty, is her sweetness to him. 

No ! The wise, who had made their observations 
on the trees of the garden, would not expect to 
gather grapes of thorns or lig-trees : he was the 



200 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by natural law, 
again and again, after his kind, whatever use people 
might make of it. Certainly, his actual presence 
never lost its power, and Faustina was glad in it to- 
day, the birthday of one of her children, a boy who 
stood at her knee holding tenderly in his fingers a 
tiny silver trumpet, one of his birthda}^ gifts. '* I, 
for my part, unless I conceive my hurt as such, have 
no hurt at all " — boasts the would-be apathetic em- 
peror — " and how I care to conceive of the thing 
rests with me." Yet when his children fall sick or 
die, this pretence breaks dow^n ; and he is broken- 
hearted : and one of the charms of certain of his 
letters still extant, is his reference to those childish 
sicknesses — " On my return to Lorium," he writes, 
" I found my little lady — domnularn 7neam — in a 
fever ;" and again, in a letter to one of the most 
serious of men, " You will be glad to hear that our 
little one is better and running about the room — 
'parvolani nostrara melius valere et intra cuhiculum 
disGurrereP 

The young Commodus had departed from the cham- 
ber, anxious to w^itness the exercises of certain gladia- 
tors (his native taste for them being, according to 
popular rumor, an inheritance from his true father) 
and to escape from the too staid compan}" of the 
gravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had 
even seen, the tutor of the imperial children, who had 
arrived to offer his birthday congratulations, and now, 
very familiarly and affectionately, made a part of 
the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor. 



MAT^TUS THE EPTCITREAN. 201 

icissing tiie empress Faustina in the face, the little 
ones on both face and hands. Marcus Cornelius 
Fronto, the " Oratoi'," the favorite among the many 
teachers of the emperor's youth, afterwards his most 
trusted counsellor, and now the undisputed occupant 
of the sophistic throne, whose equipage, elegantly 
mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets 
of Rome, had certainly turned his many personal 
gifts to account, with a good fortune, remarkable 
even in that age, so indulgent to professors, or 
rhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius, 
alwa3^s generous to his teachers, arranging even 
their quarrels sometimes, for they were not always 
fair to each other, had helped him to a really great 
place in the world. But his sumptuous appendages, 
including the villa and gardens of Maecenas, had 
been borne with an air perfectly becoming, by the 
professor of a philosophy which, even in its most 
accomplished and elegant phase, included a gentle 
contempt for such things. AYith an intimate 
practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies, 
smiles, disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every 
kind — a whole accomplished rhetoric of daily life- 
he commanded them all for purposes of humanity, 
and above all of familv affection. Throuo^h a lonff 
life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were, sur- 
rounded by the gracious and soothing air of his own 
eloquence — the fame, the echoes of it — like warbling 
birds, or murmuring bees. Setting forth in that, 
the best ideas of matured pagan philosophy, he had 
become a favorite " director " of noble youth. 



202 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Yes 1 it was the one instance Marius, always eageily 
on the look-out for such, had yet seen of a perfectly 
tolerable, perfectly beautiful, old age — of an old age 
iu which there seemed, to one who perhaps habitually 
overvalued the expression of youth, nothing to be 
regretted, nothing really lost, in what years had taken 
away. The wise old man, whose blue eyes and fair 
skin were so delicate, uncontaminate and clear, would 
seem to have carefully and consciously replaced each 
natural trait of youth, as it departed from him, by 
an equivalent grace of culture ; and had the blithe- 
ness, the placid cheerfulness, as he had also the infirm- 
ity, the claim on stronger people, of a delightful child. 
And yet he seemed to be but awaiting his exit from 
life, that moment with which the Stoics were almost 
as much preoccupied as the Christians, iiowever differ- 
ently ; and set Marius pondering on the contrast 
between a placidity like that, at eighty years, and the 
sort of desperateness he was aware of in his own way 
of entertaining that thought. His infirmities never- 
theless had been painful and long-continued, with 
losses of children and pet grandchildren. What with 
the crowd, and the wretched streets, it was a sign of 
affection which had cost him something, for the old 
man to have left his own house at all that day ; and 
he was glad of the emperor's support, as he moved 
from place to place among the children he protests 
so often to have loved as his own. 

For a strange piece of literary good fortune}, at the 
beginning of the present century, has set free t'ae long- 
buried fragrance of this famous friendship of the old 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, 203 

world, from below a valueless later manuscript, in a 
series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange, 
for the most part their evening thoughts, especially on 
family anniversaries, and with entire intimacy, on 
their children, on the art of speech, on all the various 
subtleties of the " science of images," above all, of 
course, on sleep and matters of health ; full of mutual 
admiration of each other's eloquence, restless in 
absence till they see each other again, noting char- 
acteristically even their dreams of each other, expect- 
ing the day which will terminate the oiSce, or the 
business or duty, which separates them — " as supersti- 
tious people watch for the star, at the rising of which 
they may break their fast." To one of the writers, to 
Aurelius, the correspondence was sincerely of value. 
We see him once reading his letters with genuine 
delight after retiring to rest. Fronto discourages his 
pupil from writing in Greek — Why buy, at great cost, 
a foreign wine, inferior to that from his own vineyard ? 
Aurelius, on the other hand, with an extraordinary, 
innate susceptibility to words — la parole pour la 
parole, as the French say — despairs, before Fronto's 
rhetorical perfections. 

Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some 
other museums, Fronto had been struck, pleasantly 
struck, by the family likeness among the Antonines; 
and it was part of his friendship to make much of it 
in the case of the children of Faustina. " Well ! I 
have seen the little ones," he writes to Aurelius, then, 
apparently, absent from them — " I have seen the little 
ones — the pleasantest sight of my life ; for they are as 



204 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

like yourself as could possibly be. It has well repaid 
me for my journey over that slippery road, and up 
those steep I'ocks ; for I beheld you, not simply face 
to face before me, but, more generously, whichever 
way I turned, to the right or left of me. For the rest, 
I found them, heaven be thanked ! with healthy 
cheeks and lustv voices. One was holdino^ a slice of 
white bread, like a king's son ; the other a crust of 
brown bread, as becomes the offspring of a philoso- 
pher. I pray the gods to have the sower and the seed 
alike in their keeping ; to watch over this field where- 
in the ears of corn are so kindlv alike. Ah ! I heard 
too their pretty voices, so sweet that in the childish 
prattle of one and the other, I seemed somehow to 
be listening — yes ! in that chirping of your pretty 
chickens — to the limpid and harmonious notes of 
your own oratory. Take care ! you will find me 
growing independent, having those I could love in 
your place — love, on the surety of my eyes and ears." 

^'Magistro meo sahitem^'' answers the father, " I too 
have seen my little ones in your sight of them ; as, 
also, I saw yourself in reading your letter. It is that 
charming letter that forces me to write thus." — With 
reiterations of affection, that is, which are continual 
in these letters, on both sides, and which may strike 
a modern reader, either as fulsome ; or, perhaps, as 
having something in common v^ith the old Judaic 
unction of friendship ; but which were certainly 
sincere. 

It was to one of those children that Fronto had 
now brought the birthday gift of the silver trumpet, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 205 

upon which he ventured to blow softly now and 
again, turning away with delighted eyes at the 
sound, when he thought the old man was not listen- 
ing. It was the well-worn, valetudinarian subject of 
sleep, on which Fronto and Aurelius were talking 
together ; Aurelius always feeling it a burden, 
Fronto a thing of magic capacities, so that he had 
written an encomium in its praise, and often by 
ingenious arguments recommends his imperial pupil 
"lot to stint it. To-day, with his younger listeners 
in mind, he had a stor}^ to tell about it : — 

" They say that our father Jupiter, when he or- 
dered the world at the beginning, divided time into 
two parts exactly equal ; the one part he clothed 
with light, the other with darkness ; he called them 
Day and Night ; and he assigned rest to the night 
and to day the work of life. At that time Sleep 
was not yet born and men passed the whole of their 
lives awake : only, the quiet of the night was or- 
dained for them, instead of sleep. But it came to 
pass, little by little, being that the minds of men are 
restless, that they carried on their business alike by 
night as by day, and gave no part at all to repose. 

And Jupiter, when he perceived that even in the 
night-time they ceased not from trouble and dispu- 
tation, and that even the courts of law remained 
open (it was the pride of Marcus, as Fronto knew, 
to preside in such courts till far into the night), re- 
solved to appoint one of his brothers to be the over- 
seer of the night and have authority over man's 
rest, But Neptune pleaded in e^^cuse the gravity of 



206 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

his constant charge of the seas, and Father Dis the 
difficulty of keeping in subjection the spirits below : 
and Jupiter, having taken counsel with the other 
gods, perceived that the practice of night h^ vigils 
was somewhat in favor. It was by night, for the 
most part, that Juno gave birth to her children ; 
Minerva, the mistress of all art and craft, loved the 
midnight himp ; Mars delighted in the night for his 
plots and sallies; and the favor of Yenus and Bac- 
chus was with those who roused by night. Then it 
was that Jupiter formed the design of creating 
Sleep ; and he added him to the number of the gods, 
and gave him the charge over night and rest, putting 
into his hands the keys of human eyes. With his 
own hands he mingled the juices wherewith Sleep 
should soothe the hearts of mortals — herb of Enjo}''- 
ment and herb of Safety, gathered from a grove in 
Heaven ; and, from the meadows of Acheron, the 
herb of Death ; expressing from it one single drop 
only, no bigger than a tear that one might hide. 
' With this juice,' he said, ' pour slumber upon the 
eyelids of mortals. So soon as it hath touched them 
they will la}^ themselves down motionless, under thy 
power. But be not afraid : they will revive, and in 
a while stand up again upon their feet.' After that, 
Jupiter gave wings to Sleep, attached, not to his 
heels, like Mercury's, but to his shoulders, like the 
wings of Love. For he said, ' It becomes thee not 
to approach men's eyes as with the noise of a char 
iot, and the rushing of a swift courser, but with 
placid aad merciful flight, as upon the wings of ^ 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 207 

swallow — nay ! not so much as with the fluttering of 
a dove.' Besides all this, that he might be yet 
pleasanter to men, he committed to him also a mul- 
titude of blissful dreams, according to every man's 
desire. One watched his favorite actor ; another 
listened to the flute, or guided a charioteer in the 
race : in his dream, the soldier was victorious, the 
general was carried in triumph, the wanderer re- 
turned home. Yes! — and sometimes those dreams 
come true ! " 

Just then Aurelius was summoned to make the 
birthday offerings to his household gods. A heavy 
tapestry was drawn back ; and, beyond it, Marius 
gazed for a few moments into the Larariuni, or 
imperial chapel. A noble youth, in a white habit, 
was in waiting, with the little chest in his hand con- 
taining incense for the use of the altar. On richly 
carved consoles^ or sideboards, around this narrow 
chamber, were arranged the rich apparatus of wor- 
ship and the golden or gilded images, adorned to- 
day with the freshest flowers — among them that 
image of Fortune, which had come from the apart, 
ment of Antoninus Pius — and those of the emperor's 
own teachers who had gone to their rest. A dim 
fresco on the wall commemorated the ancient piety 
of Lucius Albinius, who escaping from Komeaftera 
great disaster and overtaking certain priests on foot, 
with their sacred utensils, descended from the wagon 
in which he rode and yielded it to the ministers of 
the gods. It was just as he passed into the chapel 
that the emperor paused, and with a grave but 



208 MaRius the epicurean. 

friendly look at his 3'oung visitor, delivered a parting 
sentence, audible to him only : Imitation is the 'most 
acceptahle jpart of %oorsliip ; and the gods had much 
rather Tnanhmd shotdd resemble than flatter them — 
Make stcre that those to whom you come nearest he the 
hajpjpier^ at leasts hy your presence ! 

It was the ver}^ spirit of the scene and the hour — 
the hour Marius had spent in the imperial house. 
How temperate, how tranquilizing ! what humanity ! 
— Yet, as he left the eminent company, concerning 
whose way of life at home he had been so youth- 
fully curious, and sought, after his manner, to deter- 
mine the main trait in all that ; he had to confess 
that it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a 
mediocrity, for once, really golden. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

MANLY AMUSEMENT. 

During the Eastern war there had been a moment 
when a schism in the empire seemed possible through 
the defection of Lucius Verus ; when to Aurelius it 
had seemed also possible to confirm his allegiance by 
no less a gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla, the 
eldest of his children — the domnula^ probably, of 
those letters. The little lady, grown now" to strong 
and stately maidenhood, had been ever something 
of the good genius, the better soul, to Lucius Yerus, 
bv the law of contraries ; her somewhat cold and 
apathetic modesty acting as counterfoil to the young 
man's tio^rish fervor; and she had o^one out to him 
at Ephesus and become his wife by the form of civil 
marriage, the more solemn w^edding rites being de- 
ferred till the return of the bride and bridegroom 
to Rome. 

The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious 
marriage, in which the bride and bridegroom par- 
took of a certain mystic bread together, accordingly 
took place with due pomp, early in the spring ; 
Aurelius himself assisting, with much domestic feel- 
ing. A crowd of fashionable people filled the space 
before the entrance to the apartments of Lucius, 
14 ;e09 



210 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

richly adorned to-day with carpets and flowers, on 
the Palatine hill, commenting, not always quite deli- 
cately, upon the various details of the rite, which 
only a favored few succeeded in actually witnessing. 
" She is coming ! " Marius could hear them say, 
" escorted by her young brothers. It is the young 
Commodus who carries the torch of white-thorn- 
wood and her little basket of work-things, with the 
toys for the children " — and then, after a watchful 
pause, " She is winding the woolen thread round 
the doorposts — Ah ! I see the marriage-cake : the 
bridegroom presents the fire and water " — Then, in 
a longer pause, was heard the chorus, Thalassie ! 
Thalassie ! and just for a few moments, in the 
strange light of many wax tapers at noonday, Marina, 
could see them both, bride and bridegroom, side by 
side, while the bride was lifted over the doorstep — 
Lucius Yerus heated and handsome ; the pale, im 
passive Lucilla looking very long and slender, in her 
closely folded yellow veil, and high nuptial crown. 

As Marius turned away, glad to escape from the 
pressure of the crowd, he found himself face to face 
with Cornelius, an infrequent spectator on occasions 
such as this. It was a relief to depart with him — so 
fresh and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid 
equestrian array in honor of the ceremony — from 
the garish heat of the scene of the marriage. The 
reserve which had puzzled Marius so much on that 
first day in Rome, was an instance of many, to him 
unaccountable, avoidances of things and persons, 
which oertamly meant that an intimate companion- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 211 

sliip might cost him something in the way of seem- 
ingly indifferent amusements and experiences. Some 
inward standard, Marias seemed to detect there 
(though wholly unable to estimate it) of distinction, 
selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the 
fervid and corrupt life across which they were mov- 
ing together, — some secret, constraining motive, ever 
on the alert at eve and ear, which carried him throuo^h 
Rome as under a charm, so that Marius could not 
but think of that figure of the white bird in the 
market-place as certainly made true of him. And 
Marius was still full of admiration for this com- 
panion, who had known also how to make himself 
very pleasant to him. Here was the clear, cold cor- 
rective which the fever of his»present life demanded. 
Without that, he would have felt alternately suf- 
focated and exhausted by an existence, at once so 
gaudy and overdone, and yet so intolerably^ empty ; 
in which people, at their best, seemed only to be 
brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over a 
world's disillusion. For with all the severity of 
Cornelius, there was such a breeze of hopefulness — 
freshness and hopefulness, as of new morning — about 
him. For the most part, as I said, those reserves 
and refusals of his seemed unaccountable. But there 
were some cases where the unknown monitor acted 
in a direction with which the judgment, or instinct, 
of Marius wholly concurred; though still further 
reinforced by the effective decision of Cornelius, as 
by a kind of outwardly-embodied conscience. And 
the entire drift of his education determined him, on 



212 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

one point at least, to be wholly of one mind with 
this peculiar friend (they two, it might be, together, 
against the world !) when, alone of a whole company 
of brilliant youth, he had withdrawn from his ap- 
pointed place in the amphitheater, at a grand public 
show, which after an interval of many months, was 
presented there, in honor of the nuptials of Lucius 
Yerus and Lucilla. 

And it was still to the eye, through visible move- 
ment and aspect, that the character, or genius of 
Cornelius made itself felt by Marius ; as on that 
afternoon when he had girt on his armor, among the 
expressive ligiits and shades of the dim old villa at 
the roadside, and every object of his knightly array 
had seemed like the indication or sign of something 
far beyond itself. Consistently with his really poetic 
temper, things reached Marius, even more exclusively 
than he was aware, through sensuous media. From 
Flavian, in that brief early summer of his existence, 
he had derived a powerful impression of the " per- 
petual flux ; " he had caught there, as in cipher or 
symbol, or low whispers more effective than any def- 
inite language, his Cyrenaic philosophy, presented 
thus for the first time, in an image or person, with 
much beauty and attractiveness, and touched also, in 
this way, with a pathetic sense of personal sorrow — a 
concrete image, the abstract equivalent of which he 
discovered afterwards, when that agitating personal 
influence had settled down for him, clearly enough, 
into a theory of practice. — Of what possible intel- 
lectual formula could this mystic Cornelius be the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 213 

sensible exponent ; seeming as he did, to live ever 
in close relationship with, and recognition of, a mental 
view, a source of discernment, a light upon his way, 
which had certainly not as yet sprung up for Marius ? 
Meantime the discretion of Cornelius, his energetic 
clearness and purity, were a charm, rather physical 
than moral ; or at least his exquisite correctness of 
spirit accorded so perfectly with the regular beauty 
of his person, as to seem to depend upon it. And, 
wholly different as was this later friendship, with 
its warning and exigent restraints, from that old 
feverish attachment of Flavian, which had made him, 
at times, like an uneasy slave ; still, like that, it was 
a reconcilement to the world of sense, the visible 
world. From the hopefulness of that gracious pres- 
ence, the visible things around him, even the com- 
mon objects of everyday life — if they but stood to- 
gether to warm their hands at the same fire — took 
for him a new poetry, a delicate, fresh bloom, and 
interest. It was as if his bodily eyes had been in- 
deed mystically washed, renewed, strengthened. 

And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would 
Flavian have taken his place in the amphitheater, 
among the youth of his own age ! with what an ap- 
petite for every detail of the entertainment, and its 
various accessories — the sunshine, filtered into soft 
gold by the vela^ with their serpentine patterning, 
spread over the more select part of the company — 
the Yestal virgins, taking their privilege of seats near 
the empress Faustina, who sat there in a maze of 
double-colored gems, changing, as she moved, like 



214 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

tb* waves of the sea — the cool circle of shadow, in 
which the wonderful toilets of the heaii monde told 
so effectived around the blazing arena, recovered, at 
intervals during the many hours' show with clean 
sand for absorbing certain great red patches there, 
by troops of white-shirted boys, for whom the good- 
natured audience provided a scramble of nuts and 
small coin, flung to them over a trellis-work of amber 
and silver gilt, the precious gift of Nero ; while a 
rain of flowers and perfume fell over themselves, as 
they paused, between the parts of their long feast 
upon animal suffering. 

During his sojourn at Ephesus, Lucius Verus had 
readily become a patron, or jprotege, of the great 
goddess of Ephesus, the goddess of hunters ; and the 
show, celebrated by way of a compliment to him to- 
day, was to present some incidents of her story, in 
which she figures almost as the genius of madness in 
animals, or in the humanity which comes in contact 
with them. The spectacle would have an element of 
old Greek revival in it, welcome to the taste of a 
learned and Hellenizing society ; and, as Lucius 
Yerus was in some sense a lover of animals, was to 
be a show of animals, mainly. There would be real 
wild and domestic creatures, all of rare species ; and 
a real slaughter. On so happy an occasion, the elder 
emperor might even concede a point, and a living 
criminal fall into the jaws of the wild beasts. And 
the entire spectacle was, certainly, to end in the 
destruction, by one mighty shower of arrows, of a 
iundred lions, " nobly " provided by Aurelius him 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 215 

self for the amusement of his people — tarn magna- 
nimusfuit ! 

The arena, disposed and decked for the first scene, 
looked delightfully fresh, reinforcing on the spirits 
of the audience the actual freshness of the morning, 
which at that season still brought the dew. Along 
the subterranean ways which led up to it, the sound 
of an advancing chorus was at last heard, chanting 
the words of a sacred Song, or Hymn to Diana : for, 
after all, the spectacle of the amphitheater was still 
a religious occasion ; its bloodshed having, in a man- 
ner, a sacrificial character, tending conveniently to 
soothe the humane sensibilities of so religious an 
emperor as Aurelius, who, in his fraternal compla- 
cency, had consented to preside over the shows. 

Artemis — Diana — as she may be understood in the 
actual development of her worship, was, indeed, the 
symbolical expression of two allied yet contrasted 
elements of human temper and experience — man's 
amity, and also his enmity, towards the wild creatures, 
when they were still, in a sense, his brothers. She 
Is the complete and highly complex representative of 
a state, in which man was still much occupied with 
animals ; not as his flock, nor as his servants (after 
the pastoral relationship of our later orderly world) 
but more as his equals, on friendly terms, or the 
reverse — a state full of primeval sympathies and an- 
tipathies, of rivalries and common wants ; while he 
watched, and entered into, the humors of those 
*' younger brothers," with an intimacy, the survivals 
of which in a later age seem often to have had a 



216 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

kind of madness about thera. Diana represents the 
bright and dark sides of that relationship. But the 
humanities of it were all forgotten to-day in the ex- 
citement of a show, in which mere cruelty to animals, 
their useless suffering and death, formed the main 
point of interest. The people watched their de- 
struction, batch after batch, in a not particularly 
inventive fashion ; though it was hoped that the 
animals themselves, as living creatures are apt to do 
when hard put to it, would become inventive, and 
make up, by the fantastic accidents of their agony, 
for the deficiencies of an age fallen behind in this 
matter of manly amusement. It was as a Deity of 
Slaughter — the Taurian goddess, who requires the 
sacrifice of shipwrecked sailors, thrown on her coasts 
— the cruel, moonstruck huntress, who brings not 
onh'' sudden death, but rabies^ among the wild 
creatures, that Diana was to be presented in the 
person of a famous courtesan. The aim at an actual 
theatrical illusion, after the first introductorj^ scene* 
was frankly surrendered to the display of the animals, 
artificially stimulated and maddened to attack each 
other. And as Diana was also a special protectress 
of new-born creatures, there would be an interest in 
the dexterously contrived escape of the 3^oung from 
their mothers' torn bosoms ; as many pregnant 
animals as possible being carefully selected for the 
show. 

The time had been, and was to come again, when 
the pleasures of the amphitheater centered in a sim- 
ilar practical joking upon human beings. What 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 217 

more ingenious diversion had stage-manager ever 
contrived than that incident, itself a practical epi- 
gram never to be forgotten, \Yhen a criminal, who, 
like slaves and animals, had no rights, was compelled 
to present the part of Icarus ; and, the wings failing 
him in due course, had fallen among a crowd of 
hungry bears. For the long shows of the amphi- 
theater were, so to speak, the novel-reading of 
that age — the current help provided for sluggish 
imaginations, in the matter of grisly accidents such 
as might happen to oneself ; but with every facility 
for comfortable inspection. Scaevola might watch 
his own hand consuming in the fire, in the person of 
a criminal, willing to redeem his life by an act so 
delightful to the eyes, the very ears, of a curious 
public. If the part of Mars3^as w^as called for, there 
was a criminal condemned to lose his skin. It might 
be almost edifying to study minutely the expression 
of his face, while the assistants corded and pegged 
him to the bench, cunningly ; the servant of the law 
waiting by, who, after one short cut with his knife, 
would slip the man's leg from his skin, as neatly as 
as if it were a stocking — a finesse in providing 
a due amount of suffering for criminals, onl}^ 
brought to its height in ISTero's living torches. But 
then, by making his suffering ridiculous, you enlist 
against the sufferer, much real, and all would-be 
manliness, and do much to stifle any false sentiment 
of compassion. The philosophic emperor, having no 
great taste for sport, and asserting here a personal 
scruple, had greatly changed all that ; had provided 



218 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

that nets should be spread under tlie dancers on the 
tight-rope, and buttons for the swords of the gladia- 
tors. But the gladiators were still there. Their 
bloody contests had, under the form of a popular 
amusement, the efficacy of a human sacrifice : as the 
whole system of the public shows was understood 
to have a religious import. Just at this point, cer- 
tainly the judgment of Lucretius on pagan relig- 
ion is without reproach — 

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. 

And Marius, weary and indignant, feeling inso- 
lated in the great slaughter-house, could not but take 
notice that Aurelius, in his habitual complaisance to 
Lucius Verus, who lounged beside him, shouting his 
applause from time to time, had sat impassibly 
through all the hours Marius himself had remained 
there ; for the most part, indeed, actually averting 
his eyes from the show, reading, or writing on 
matters of public business; yet, after all, indifferent 
He was revolving, perhaps, that old Stoic paradox 
of the iniperceptihility of ]}ain : which might serve 
as an excuse, should those savage popular humors 
ever again turn against men and women. Marius 
remembered well his very attitude and expression on 
this day, when, a few years later, certain things 
came to pass In Gaul, under his full authority : and 
that attitude and expression defined already, even 
thus early in their so friendly intercourse, and though 
he was still full of gratitude for his interest, a per- 
manent point of difference between the emperor and 



MARIUS TIHE EPICUREAN. 219 

himself — between himself, and all the convictions of 
his life, taking center to-day in his merciful, angry 
heart ; and Aurelius, as representing all the light, all 
the apprehensive power there might be in pagan in- 
tellect. There was something in a tolerance like that, 
in the bare fact that Aurelius could sit patiently 
through a scene like that, which seemed to Marius to 
mark him as eternally his inferior on the question of 
righteousness ; to set them on opposite sides, in some 
great conflict, of which this difference was but one 
presentment. Due, in whatever proportions, to the 
abstract principles he had formulated for himself, or 
in spite of them, there was the loyal conscience in 
him, deciding, judging himself and every one else, 
with a wonderful sort of authority — You ought, me- 
thinks, to be something quite different from that you 
are ; here, and here ! Certainly, Aurelius was lack- 
ing in that decisive conscience on sight, of the inti- 
mations of which Marius could entertain no doubt — 
which he demanded in others. He at least, the 
humble follower of the eye, was aware of a crisis in 
life — in that brief obscure existence — a fierce oppo- 
sition of real good and real evil, around him ; the 
issues of which he must by no means compromise or 
confuse ; but of the antagonisms of which the wise 
man was, certainly, unaware. 

The long chapter of the cruelty of the Roman 
public shows may, perhaps, have for its first result 
upon us a feeling of self-complacency. Yet it might 
be well to ask ourselves — it is always well to do 
that, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance. 



220 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

or of great religious persecutions, on this side or on 
that, or of anything else which raises in us the 
question, " Is thy servant a dog, that he should do 
this ? "— not merely, what germs of feeling we may 
possess, which, under fitting circumstances, might 
induce us to the like; but, even more practically^ 
what thoughts, what sort of considerations, our 
minds may actually entertain, which would have 
furnished us, had we lived in another age, and in the 
midst of those legal crimes, with a plausible excusing 
of them : each age, perhaps, having its great point 
of blindness, with its consequent great sin — the 
touch-stone in it of a never-failing conscience in the 
select few. 

Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin 
of blindness, of deadness and stupidity, in the age of 
Marius ; and his light had not failed him regarding 
it. Yes ! what was wanting was the heart that 
would make it impossible to witness all this ; and 
the future would be with the forces that could beget 
a heart like that. His favorite philosophy had 
said. Trust the eye: Strive to be right always, re- 
garding the concrete experience: Never falsify 
your impressions. And its sanction had been at 
least effective here, in saying, It is what I may not 
see ! — Surely, evil was a real thing ; and the wise 
man wanting in the sense of it, where not to have 
been, by instinctive election, on the right side, was 
to have failed in life- 



PART THE THIRD. 



CHAPTER Xy. 

STOICISM AT COURT. 

The very finest flower of the same company— 

Aurelius with the gilt fasces borne before him, a 

crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, 

and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who 

maintained, it was said, their own private sophists to 

whisper philosophy into their ears as they made their 

toilets — was assembled again a few months later, in 

a different place and for a very different purpose. 

The temple of Peace, a foundation of Hadrian's, 

enlarged by a library and lecture-rooms, had grown 

into an institution resembling something between a 

college and a literary club ; and here Cornelius 

Fronto was to deliver a discourse on the Nature of 

Morals. There were some, indeed, who had desired 

the emperor Aurelius himself to declare his whole 

mind on this matter. Rhetoric had become almost 

a function of the state. Philosophy was upon the 

throne ; and had from time to time, by request, 

delivered an official utterance with well-nigh divine 

authority. And it was as the delegate of this 

authority, under the full sanction of the philosopher 

pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to 

223 



224 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

expound some parts of the Stoic doctrine^ with the 
view of recommending morals and making them 
acceptable to that refined but perhaps prejudiced 
company, as being, in effect, one mode of comeliness 
in things — a fair order, and, as it were, a kind of 
music in life. And he did this earnestly, with an 
outlay of all his science of mind, and that eloquence 
of which he was known to be a master. For Stoicism 
was no longer a rude and unkempt thing. Received 
at court, it had largely decorated itself : it had be- 
come persuasive and insinuating, and sought not only 
to convince men's intelligences but to allure their 
souls. Associated with that fair old age of the great 
rhetorician and his winning voice, it was almost 
Epicurean. And the old man was at his best on the 
occasion ; the last on which he ever appeared in this 
way. To-day was his own birthday. Early in the 
morning the imperial letter of congratulation had 
reached him ; and all the pleasant animation it had 
caused was in his face, as assisted by his daughter 
Gratia, he took his place on the ivory chair, as presi- 
dent of the Athenoeum of Rome, wearing with a 
wonderful grace the philosophic pall — in reality 
nothing else than the loose woolen cloak of th<i 
common soldier, but fastened on his right shouldei 
with a magnificent clasp, the emperor's birthday 
gift. 

It was an age, as sufficient evidence shows, whose 
delight in rhetoric was but one element of a general 
susceptibility ; an age not merely taking pleasure in 
.words, but experiencing a great moral power in them : 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 225 

and Fronto's quaintly fashionable audience would 
have wept, and also assisted with their purses, had 
his purpose to-day been, as sometimes happened, the 
recommendation of some object of charity. As it 
was, arranging themselves at their ease among the 
images and flowers, these amateurs of beautiful lan- 
guage, with their tablets for noting carefully all the 
orator's ' most exquisite expressions, were ready to 
give themselves wholly to the intellectual treat pre- 
pared for them ; applauding, blowing loud kisses 
through the air sometimes, at the speaker's trium- 
phant exit from one of his long, skilfully modulated 
sentences; while the younger of them meant to 
imitate everything about him, dow^n to the inflections 
of his voice and the very folds of his mantle. Cer- 
tainly there was rhetoric enough for them — a wealth 
of imagery ; illustrations from painting, music, myth- 
ology, the experiences of love ; a management, by 
which subtle, unexpected meaning w^as brought out 
of familiar words, like flies from morsels of amber, 
to use Fronto's own figure. But with all its richness, 
the higher claim of Fronto's style was rightly under- 
stood to lie in gravity and self-command, and an 
especial care for the purity of a vocabulary which 
rejected every term and phrase not stamped with 
the authority of the most approved ancient models. 
And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes 
happen, that this general discourse to a general 
audience had the effect of an utterance dexterously 
desifj^ned for him. With a conscience still vibratinir 
forciblv under the shock of that day in the amphi- 



226 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

theater, and full of the ethical charm of the character 
of his friend Cornelius, as he conceived it, he was 
questioning himself with much impatience, as to the 
possibility of an adjustment between his own elabo- 
rately thought-out intellectual scheme and the old 
morality ; which, as such, had as yet found noplace 
in it, inasmuch as that old morality seemed to demand 
the concession of certain first principles which might 
misdirect or retard him in the effort towards a 
complete, man3^-sided existence ; or distort the revela- 
tions of the experience of life ; or curtail his natural 
liberty of heart and mind. And yet there was the 
taint of a possible antmomianism there ; of which 
(his imagination being filled just then with the noble 
and resolute air, the gayety almost, which composed 
the outward mien and presentment of his friend's 
inflexible ethics) he felt a nascent jealousy, as being, 
to say tbe least, a kind of slur upon his taste, wound- 
ing that intellectual pride to which it was one pecu- 
liarity of his philosophic scheme to allow so much. 
And it was precisely such a moral situation as this 
that Fronto appeared to be contemplating. He 
seemed to have before his mind the case of one — 
Cyrenaic or Epicurean, as the courtier tends to be, 
by habit and instinct, if not on principle — who yet 
experiences, actually, a strong tendency to moral 
assents, and a desire, with as little logical incon- 
sistency as may be, to find a place for duty and 
righteousness, in his house of thought. 

And the Stoic professor found the key to this 
problem in the purely aesthetic beauty of the old 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 227 

morality, as a prevailing actual system in things, 
fascinating to the imagination — to taste in its most 
developed form — through association ; a system or 
order, as a matter of fact in possession, not only 
of the great world, but of the rare minority of elite 
intelligences ; from which, therefore, least of ak 
would the sort of Epicurean he was contemplating 
endure to be, so to speak, an outlaw. He supposed his 
hearer to be sincerely in search of a practical principle 
(and it was here that he seemed to Marius to be 
speaking straight to him) which might give unity of 
motive to an actual rectitude of life — a probity and 
cleanness of life, in fact — determined partly by 
purely natural affection, partly by an enlightened 
self-interest, or the feeling of honor ; due in part 
even to the mere fear of penalties : no element of 
which, however, was distinctively moral, as such, in 
the agent ; and affording, therefore, no common 
ground of sympathy with a really ethical being like 
Cornelius, or even like the philosophic emperor. 
Performing the same offices ; actually satisfying, 
even as they, the external claims of others ; rendering 
to all their dues — a person thus circumstanced would 
be wanting, nevertheless, in a principle of inward 
adjustment to the moral beings around him. How 
tenderly — more tenderly than many stricter souls — 
might such an one yield himself to kindly instinct! 
what a fineness of charity in passing judgment on 
others ! what an exquisite conj^^cience of other men's 
susceptibilities ! He knows for how much the man- 
ner, because the heart itself, counts, in doin^ a kiiad- 



228 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

ness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all 
weakly creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be 
but sentient is to possess rights. He conceives a 
hundred duties, though he may not call them by that 
name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls 
may have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in 
doing: more than thev, in a wav of his own. Some- 
times, he mav think that those men of line and rule 
do not really understand their own business. How 
narrow, inflexible, unintelligent! — what poor guard- 
ians, he may reason, of the inward spirit of righteous- 
ness — are some supposed careful walkers according to 
its letter and form ! And still, all the while, he allows 
no moral world as such ; real though it be to 
^schylus, to Socrates, to Yirgil ; as also to a thou- 
sand commonplace souls. 

But over and above these practical rectitudes, thus 
determined by natural affection or self-love or fear, 
he may notice that there is a remnant of right con- 
duct — what he does, still more what he abstains from 
doing — not so much through his own free election, 
as from a deference, an "assent," entire, habitual, 
unconscious, to custom — to the actual habit or fashion 
of others, from whom he could not endure to break 
away, any more than he would care to be out of 
agreement with them in questions of mere manner, 
or, say, even, of dress. Yes ! there were the evils, 
the vices, w^hich he avoided as, essentially, a soil. 
An assent, such as this, to the preferences of others 
might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the 
rectitude it could determine the least considerable 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 229 

element in moral life. Yet here, according to Fronto, 
was in trutli tlie revealing example, albeit operating 
upon comparative trifles, of the general principle 
required. There was one great idea (Fronto pro- 
ceeded to expound the idea of humanity — of a uni- 
versal commonwealth of minds — which yet somehow 
becomes conscious, and as if incarnate, in a select 
body of just men made perfect) in association with 
which the determination to conform to precedent 
was elevated into the weightiest, the fullest, the 
clearest principle of moral action ; a principle under 
which one might subsume men's most strenuous 
efforts after righteousness. 

'0 x6(Tfw? (jj(Ta<^£i xr>/£9 k'oTt'^ — the woHd IS as it were 
a commonwealth, a city : and there are observances, 
customs, usages actually current in it — things our 
friends and companions will expect of us, as the 
condition of our living there with them at all, as 
really their peers, or fellow-citizens. Those observ- 
ances were, indeed, the creation of a visible or 
invisible aristocrac}^ in it, whose actual manners, 
whose preferences from of old, become now a weighty 
tradition as to the way in which things should be 
or not be done, are like a music, to wliich the inter- 
course of life proceeds — such a music as no one who 
had once caught its harmonies would willingly jar. 
In his way, the hecoinmg^ as the Greeks — or manners^ 
as both Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a 
comprehensive term for duty. Righteousness would 
be, in the words of the Caesar himself, but the 
" following of the reasonable will and ordinance of 



230 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

the oldest, the most venerable, of all cities and 
polities— the reasonable will of the royal, the law- 
giving element in it—forasmuch as we are citizens 
in that supreme city on high, of which all other cities 
beside are but as single habitations." But as the old 
man spoke with animation of this supreme city, this 
invisible society, whose conscience had become ex- 
plicit in its inner circle of inspired souls ; of whose 
common, pervading spirit, the trusted leaders of 
human conscience had been but the mouthpiece, and 
of whose successive personal preferences in the con- 
duct of life, the old morality was the sum,— Marius, 
who had been so jealous of the claims of that old 
morality, felt that his own thoughts were passino* 
beyond the actual intention of the speaker ; not in 
the direction of any clearer theoretic and abstract 
definition of that ideal commonwealth, but rather as 
if in search of its visible locality and abiding-place, 
the towers of which, so to speak, he might see and 
count, according to his own old, natural habit of 
mind. It would be the fabric, the outward fabric, of 
a system reaching, certainly, far beyond the great 
city around him, even if conceived in all the 
machinery of its visible and invisible influences at 
their grandest— as Augustus or Trajan might have 
conceived of them —however well that visible Rome 
might pass for a figure of this new, unseen Eome on 
high. At moments, Marius even asked himself with 
surprise, whether it could be some vast secret society, 
to whichFronto referred ?— that august community, 
to be an outlavv from which, to be foreign to the man- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 23^ 

ners of which, was a loss so much greater than to be 
excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the sover- 
eign Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal 
order, the great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, 
the mastery of their example over their successors — 
these were the stimulating ideas, the abstract intel- 
lectual conceptions, by association with which the 
Stoic professor had tried to elevate, and unite under 
a single principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted 
up with so real an enthusiasm. But where should 
Marius search for all that, as more than an intel- 
lectual abstraction ? Where were those elect souls 
in whom the claim of humanity became so amiable, 
winning, persuasive — whose footsteps through the 
world were so beautiful in the actual order he saw ; 
whose faces averted from him, would be more than 
he could bear ? Where was that comely order, to 
which as a great fact of experience he must give its 
due ; to which, as to all other beautiful " phenomena," 
in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust and relate 
himself ? 

Eome did well to be serious. Fronto's discourse 
ended somewhat abruptly, as the noise of a great 
crowd in motion was heard below the walls ; where- 
upon, the audience, following the humor of its more 
youthful element, poured itself into the colonnade, 
from the steps of which Marius saw the famous pro- 
cession, or trcmsvectio of the military knights, passing 
over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the 
temple of Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri^ ^t 



232 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

was taking place this year, not on the day accus- 
tomed — anniversary of the victory of the Lake Re- 
gillus, with its pair of celestial assistants — and amid 
the heat and roses of a Roman July; but, by antic- 
ipation, some months earHer; the almond-trees 
along the way being still in leafless flower. Behind 
their light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, 
arrayed in all their gleaming ornaments, and wear- 
ing chaplets of olive round their casques; the faces 
below, which, what with plague and battle, were 
nearly all youthful. It was a flowery scene enough; 
but had to-day its fulness of war-like meaning; the 
return of the army to the north, where the enemy 
was again upon the move, being imminent. Corne- 
lius had ridden along in his place; and, on the dis- 
missal of the company, passed below the steps where 
Marius stood, with that new song which he had 
heard once before floating from his lips. 



CHAPTER XYI. 

SECOND THOUGHTS. 

And Marius, for his part, was grave enough. Free 
to's discourse, with its wide prospect over the human, 
the spiritual, horizon, had set him on a review — on 
a review of the isolating narrowness, in particular, 
of his own theoretic scheme. Long after even the 
roses had faded, when " the town " had departed 
to country villas or the baths or the war, he re- 
mained behind in Kome ; anxious to try the last- 
ingness of his own Epicurean rose-garden : setting 
to work over again, and deliberately passing from 
point to point of that old argument with himself, 
down to its practical conclusions. That age and 
our own have much in common — many difficulties 
and hopes. Let the reader pardon me if here and 
there I seem to be passing from Marius to his 
modern representatives — from Rome, to Paris or 
London. 

What really were its claims as a theory of feeling 

and practice ? It had been a theory, avowedly, of 

loss and gain, so to call it — of an economy : and if 

it missed something in the commerce of life, which 

some other theorv of feeling and practice found it 

233 



234 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

self able to save, if it made a needless sacrifice, then, 
it must be in manner inconsistent with itself, and 
lack theoretic completeness. Did it make such a 
sacrilice ? What did it lose ? 

And we ma}^ note, as Marius could hardly have 
done, that that new Cyrenaicism of his is ever the 
characteristic philosophy of youth — ardent, but 
narrow in its survey ; sincere, but apt to be one-sided, 
and even fanatical. It is one of those subjective and 
partial ideals, based on vivid, because limited, appre- 
hension of the truth of one aspect of experience — in 
this case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity 
of man's life in it — of which it mav be said, that it 
is the special vocation of the young to express them. 
In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh 
Greek w-orld, we may think we see that philosophy 
where it is least hlase^ as we say ; in its raost_ 
pleasant, its blithest, and yet perhaps its wisest 
form, youthfully bright in the youth of European 
thought. But it grows young again for a Avhile in 
almost every youthful soul. We hear it spoken of 
sometimes, as the appropriate utterance of jaded 
men ; but in them it can hardly be sincere, or, by 
the nature of the case, an enthusiasm. '^ Walk in 
the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine 
eyes," is, indeed, most often, according to the sup- 
position of the book from which I quote it, the coun- 
sel of the young, who feel that the sunshine is 
pleasant along their veins, and wintry weather, 
though in a general way foreseen, along way off. 
The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism, the seif-aban- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 235 

donment to one favorite school or [)hase, of thought 
or taste, which occurs, quite naturally, at the outset 
of every really vigorous intellectual career, finds its 
special opportunity in a theory such as that so care- 
fully put together by Marius, just because it seems 
to call on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by 
a vivid sensation of power and will, of what others 
value — the sacrifice of some conviction, or doctrine, 
or supposed first principle— for the sake of that 
clear-eyed intellectual integrity or consistency, which 
is like spotless bodily cleanliness and nicety, or 
scrupulous personal honor ; and which has for the 
mind of the youthful student, when he first comes 
to appreciate it, itself the fascination of an ideal. 

The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realized as a motive 
of earnestness or enthusiasm, is not so properly the 
utterance of the " jaded Epicurean," as of the strong 
young man in all the freshness of his thought and 
feeling, fascinated by the notion of at least lifting 
up his life to the level of some bold, adventurous 
theory ; while, in the first genial heat of existence, 
physical objects, also fair and strong, beat potently 
upon his unwearied and widely opened senses. He 
discovers a great new^ poem every spring, with a 
hundred thoughts and feelings never expressed, or 
at least never expressed so w^ell, before. The work- 
shops of the artists, who can select and set before 
one what is really most distinguished in visible life, 
are open to him. He thinks that the old Platonic, 
or the new Baconian philosophyj has been better ex- 
,plained than by the authors themselves, or with 



036 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

some striking original development, this very month. 
In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty 
gold morning, the music comes, louder at intervals, 
above the hum of voices from some neighboring 
church, among the almond-trees in blossom ; valued 
now, perhaps, only for the poetically rapt faces 
among priests or worshipers, and the mere eloquence 
and tact of its preachers of righteousness and religion ; 
for indeed, in his scrupulous idealism, he feels him- 
self to be something of a priest, and that devotion 
of his days to the contemplation of what is beauti- 
ful, a sort of perpetual religious service. Afar off, 
how many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts await 
him ! At that age, with minds of a certain con- 
stitution, no very choice or exceptional circumstances 
of life are needed to provoke an enthusiasm some- 
thing like this. Life in modern London even, in the 
heavy glow of summer, is stuff sufficient for the 
fresh imagination of a youth to build its " palace of 
art "of; and the ver\" sense and enjoyment of an 
experience in which all is new, are but enhanced, 
like that glow of summer itself, by the thought of 
its brevity ; which gives him something of the 
gamblers zest, in the apprehension, by dexterous 
act or diligently appreciative thought, of the highly 
colored moments which are to pass away so quickly. 
At bottom, perhaps, in his elaborately developed 
self-consciousness, his sensibilities, his almost fierce 
grasp upon the things he values at all, he has, be- 
yond all others, an inward need of something per- 
manent in its character, to hold by : of which cir- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, 237 

cumstance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, 
as with the brilliant Claudio in '^ Measure for Meas- 
ure," it is, in truth, but darkness he is '* encounter- 
ing, like a bride." But the inevitable falling of the 
curtain is probably a long way off ; and in the day- 
light, at least, it is not often that he really shudders 
at the thought of the grave — the weight above, and 
the narrow world and its company, within. When 
the thought of it does occur to him, he may say to 
himself — Well ! and the monk, for instance, who has 
renounced all this on the security of some dim 
world beyond it, really acquiesces in that " fifth act," 
amid all the consoling ministries around him, as little 
as I should at this moirGnt; though I may hope, 
that, as at the real ending of a play, however well 
acted, I may already have had quite enough of it, 
and find a true wellbeing in eternal sleep. 

And precisely in this circumstance, that, consist- 
ently with the function of youth in general, Cy- 
renaicism will always be more or less the special 
philosophy, or prophecy, of the young, when the 
ideal of a rich experience comes to them in the ripe- 
ness of their receptive, if not of the reflective, powers 
— precisely in this circumstance, if we rightly con- 
sider it, lies the duly prescribed corrective of that 
philosophy. For it is by its exclusiveness, and 
negatively rather than positively, that such theories 
fail to satisfy us permanently : and what they really 
need for their correction, is the complementary in- 
fluence of some greater system, in which they may 
find their due place. That' Sturm und Drang of 



238 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

the spirit, as it has been called, that ardent and 
special apprehension of half-truths, in the enthusi- 
astic, and as it were prophetic advocacy of which, 
a devotion to truth, in the case of the young — appre- 
hending but one point at a time in the great circum- 
ference — most naturally embodies itself, is leveled 
down, surely and safely enough, afterwards, as in 
history so in the individual, by the weakness and 
mere weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom, 
of our nature : — happily ! if the enthusiasm which 
answered to but one phase of intellectual growth 
really blends, as it loses its decisiveness, in a larger 
and commoner morality, with wider though perhaps 
vaguer hopes. And though truth indeed, lies, as 
has been said, " in the whole " — in harmonizings and 
adjustments like this — yet those special apprehen- 
sions mav still owe their full value, in this sense of 
" the whole," to that earlier, one-sided but ardent 
preoccupation with them. 

In the world of old Greek thought, we may notice 
with some surprise, that, in a little while, the nobler 
form of Cyrenaicism — Cyrenaicism cured of its faults 
— met the nobler form of Cynicism halfway. Start- 
ing from opposed points, they merged, each in its 
most refined form, in a single ideal of temperance or 
moderation ; which again was almost identical with 
the practical wisdom of Socrates, reflecting in its 
worthiest form, the conscience of Greece. Something 
of the same kind may be noticed regarding some later 
phases of Cyrenaicism. If it starts with a series of 
considerations opposed to the religious temper, which 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 239 

the religious temper holds it a duty to repress, it is 
like it, nevertheless, and very unlike any lower de- 
velopment of temper, in its stress and earnestness, its 
serious application to the pursuit of a very unworldly 
type of perfection : and it may be thought that the 
saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, would at 
least understand each other better than either would 
understand the mere man of the world. Stretch 
them one point further, shift the terms a little, and 
they might actually touch. 

Perhaps all theories of morals tend, as they rise 
to their best, and as conceived by their worthiest 
disciples, to identification with each other : the most 
unlikely neighbors meeting at some point higher 
than any one of them. For the variety of men's 
possible reflections on their experience, as of that 
experience itself, is not really as great as it seems: 
and as the highest and most disinterested of ethical 
formulcB^ filtering down into men's actual everyday 
existence, reach the same poor level of vulgar ego- 
tism ; so, we may fairlv suppose that all the highest 
spirits, from whatever contrasted points they may 
have started, would yet be found to entertain, in 
their moral consciousness as actually realized, much 
the same kind of company ; to hold, far more than 
might be thought probable at first sight, the same 
personal types of character, and even the same ar- 
tistic and literary types, in esteem of aversion ; and 
to have, all of them alike, the same savor of un- 
worldliness. Cyrenaicism, then, old or new, may 
be noticed, just in proportion to the completeness 



240 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

of its development, to approach, as to the noblei- 
form of Cynicism, so also to the more nob]^^ de- 
veloped phases of the old, or traditional etiiics. In 
the gravity of its conception of life, in its pursuit 
after nothing less than a perfection, in its apprehen- 
sion of the value of time — the passion and the serious- 
ness which are like a consecration — la j)assi(>n et le 
serieux qui consacrent — it may be conceived, as re 
gards its main drift, to be not so much opposed to 
the old morality, as an exaggeration of one special 
motive in it ; it might, with no real misrepresenta- 
tion, be referred or adjusted to that old morality, as 
a part to the whole. And if we see this, then comes 
the question of the value, in all ethical speculation,, 
of common terms — of terms, that is, which bring 
the narrower, or exceptional ideals and tendencies 
of character, into connection with those which are 
larger and laore generally typical ; which, instead 
of opposing them, explain the former through the 
latter. Such terms, or conceptions are important 
in practical ethics, because they largely decide our 
manner of receiving experience, and the measure we 
receive of it. They are like instruments, or points 
of view, which determine how much, and how truly, 
we shall reflect of life ; they lead our attention to 
this or that element in it, to this or that capacity in 
ourselves, in preference to another ; and, like some 
optical contrivances in the sensible world, they may 
greatly narrow the field of that experience, in their 
concentration upon some one, single, though perhaps 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 241 

very important interest in it, to which they give a 
false isolation or relief. 

It was some such cramping, narrowing, costly 
preference of one part of his own nature, and of the 
nature of things, to another, that Marius seemed to 
have detected in himself, as also in his old masters 
in the Cyrenaic philosophy. If they did realize the 
fjLouoypo'Mt? Tjdo'^Tj, as they said — the pleasure of the 
ideal now — if certain moments and spaces of their 
lives were high-pitched, passionately colored, intent 
with sensation, and a kind of knowledge, which, in 
its vivid clearness, was like sensation — if, now and 
then, they apprehended the world in its fulness, and 
had a vision, almost " beatific," of ideal personalities 
in life and art ; yet, these moments were a very costly 
matter : they paid a great price for them, if we duly 
consider it, in a thousand possible sympathies, and 
things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from 
which they detached themselves, in the mere intel- 
lectual pride of loyalty to a theory which would take 
nothing for granted, and assent to no hypothetical 
or approximate truths. If metaphysical acumen had 
cleared away the metaphysical pretension to know 
what is, that free place might be left for what ap- 
pears ; surely, the attractive aspects of morality and 
religion, as then popularly understood, might have 
ranked as at least wwAaaiat — observable, perhaps 
amiable, appearances — among the rest. The Greek 
religion was then alive : then, even more than in its 
later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was 

possible, even for the philosopher. Its story made 
|6 



242 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

little or no demand for a reasoned or formal intel- 
lectual acceptance. A religion, which had grown 
throuor"h and throuo^h man's life, so strono:lv and 
quietly ; which had meant so much for so many 
generations ; expressing so much of their hopes, in 
forms so lovelv and so familiar ; a tradition so tran- 
quilizing, linked by such complex associations to man 
as he had been, and was — a religion like this, one 
would think, might have had its uses, even for a 
philo-sophic skeptic ; without embarrassing him by 
any doubtful theory of its intellectual groundwork, 
or pushing him on to further conclusions, or in any 
way tarnishing that intellectual integrity, which will 
not suffer one, out of mere self-respect, to pass doubt- 
ful intellectual coin. But those beautiful gods, with 
the whole round of their beautiful service, the C^^re- 
naic school definitely renounced: and Euemerus, 
who has given his name to the coldest and thinnest 
of all phases of rationalism, was one of its accredited 
masters. 

The Greek morality, again, with all its imperfec- 
tions, was certainly a comely thing. — Yes ! a harmony, 
a music, in men's ways, one might well hesitate to 
jar. The merely aesthetic sense might have had a 
legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair 
order of choice manners ; in those attractive conven- 
tions, enveloping, so gracefully, the whole of life ; in- 
suring some sweetness, some security at least against 
offense, in the intercourse of the world. The dis- 
creet master of Gyrene himself had been in all but 
entire practical sympathy with it. Beyond an ob« 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 243 

vious utility, it could claim, indeed, but custom — use- 
and-wont, as we say — for its sanction. But then, 
one of the advantages of that liberty of spirit among 
the Cyrenaics (in which through theory they had 
become dead to theor\^, so that all theory, as such, 
was really indifferent to them, and indeed nothing 
valuable but in its tangible ministration to life) was 
precisely this, that it gave them free play, in the use 
of things, as mere ministers, which, to the uninitiated, 
must be masters or nothing. Yet, how little the 
followers of Aristippus made of that whole comely 
system of manners or morals, then actually in pos- 
session of life, is shown by the bold practical conse- 
quence, which one of them maintained (with hard, 
self-opinionated adherence to his peculiar theory of 
values) in the not very amiable paradox that friend- 
ship and patriotism were things one could do with- 
out ; while another — DeaW s-advocate, as he was 
called — helped so many to self-destruction, by his 
pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life, that his 
lecture-room \vas closed. That that was in the range 
of their consequences — that that was a possible, if re- 
mote, deduction from the premises of the discreet 
Aristippus — was surely an inconsistency in a thinker 
who professed above all things an economy of the 
moments of life; and such inconsistency, surely a 
double fault, in a thinker who had started with a 
verv hioh ideal of intellectual severitv. Those old 
Cyrenaics felt tlieir wa}^ as it were in the dark, we 
may be sure, like other men in the ordinary trans- 
actions of life, beyond the narrow limits they drew 



244 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

of clear and absolutely legitimate knowledge ; ad- 
mitting what was not of immediate sensation, and 
drawing upon that " fantastic " future wbich might 
never come. A little more of such " walking by 
faith," a little more of reasonable " assent," and of 
that common sense by which eternal *' AYisdom," it 
may be, " assists " the incomplete intelligence of the 
individual — and they might have profited by a hun- 
dred services to their culture, from Greek religion 
and Greek morality, as they actually were. The 
spectacle of their hard, isolated, tenacious hold on 
their own narrow apprehension, makes one think of 
a picture with no relief, no soft shadows or breadth 
of space, or of a drama without repose. Contrasted 
with the liberality of one like Socrates, their theory 
of practice, even at its best, has the narrowness — the 
fanatic narrowness — if, also, the intense force, of a 
'* heresv." 

Heresy, theologians are careful to explain, consists 
not so much in positive error, as in disproportion of 
truth ; in the exaggeration of this or that side or 
aspect, of the truth, out of the proportion of faith : 
it being assumed that such exceptional apprehensions 
of special aspects of the faith, by individual minds, 
are really provided for in the great system of catholic 
doctrine. Such a system — such a proportion of faith 
— is represented for us, in the moral order, by that 
body of moral ideas common to all Christian lands; 
which, in those lands, forms a sort of territory com 
raon to human society and the Christian church, and 
which is, in reality, the total product and effect of 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 945 

all the higher moral experience of many generations, 
and all their aspirations after a more perfect worhi : 
it expresses the moral judgment of the honest dead— - 
a body so much more numerous than the living. 

And the drift of the evolution of morals has cer- 
tainly been to allow those theories, which, as 1 have 
said, may easily become heresies ; theories which 
have, from time to time, expressed the finer, or the 
bolder, apprehensions of peculiar spirits — Benthara, 
Shelley, Carlyle, the old or the new Cyrenaics — 
theories, the motive of which is to bring special 
elements, or neglected elements it may be, of our 
common moral effort, into prominence, by explaining 
them in unusual terms, or in the terms of some non- 
moral interest in human life ; so much influence, but 
only so much, as they can exercise, in proportion 
with that system or organization of moral ideas, 
which, in Christian lands, are the common property 
of human society. And the moral development of 
the individual may well follow the tendency of that 
larger current, and permit its flights and heats, its 
elans, as the French say, only so much freedom of 
play as may be consistent with full sympathy with, 
and a full practical assent to, the moral preferences 
of that " great majority," which exercises the au- 
thority of humanity ; and is actually a vast force all 
around us. Harmonized, reduced to its true function, 
in this way, Cyrenaicism, eld or new, with its ardent 
pursuit of beauty, might become, as I said, at the 
least a very salutary corrective, in a generation which 
nas certainly not overvalued the aesthetic side of 



24:6 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

its duties, or even of its pleasures. I have been 
making use of theological terms ; and there is another 
theological term which precisely expresses what I 
mean. Such or such a heroic proposal, say the theo- 
logians, is not a precept of the cliurch, but a " counsel 
of perfection.'' Such counsels o*' perfection may be- 
come, by exaggeration or wilfulness, heresies ; yet 
they define the special vocations, success in which 
earns the '' special crown," in the case of those for 
whom they are really meant ; and it is in this way 
that Cyrenaicism, with its worship of beauty— of the 
body — of physical beauty — might perform its legit- 
imate moral function, as a " counsel of perfection," 
for a few. 

For it was of perfection that Marius (to mount up 
to him again, from his intellectual heirs) had been 
really thinking, all the time : a narrow perfection it 
might be objected, the perfection of but one part 
of his whole nature — his capacities, namely, of feeling, 
of receiving exquisite physical impressions, of an 
imaginative sympathy — but still, a true perfection of 
those capacities, wrought out to their utmost degree, 
and admirable enough in its way. He is an econo- 
mist : he hopes, by that " insight " of which the old 
Cyrenaics made so much, by a highly-trained skill in 
the apprehension of what the conditions of spiritual 
success really are, and the special circumstances of 
the occasion with which he has to deal — the special 
happinesses of his own nature — to make the most, in 
no mean or vulgar sense, of the tew years of life ; few, 
indeed, for the attainment of anything like general 



MARTUS THE EPICUREAN. 247 

perfection ! With the brevity of those years his mind 
is exceptionally impressed ; and this purpose makes 
him no frivolous dilettante^ but graver than other men : 
his scheme is not that of a trifler, but rather of one 
who gives a meaning of his own, but a quite real and 
sincere one, those old words — Let us work while it 
is day ! He has a strong apprehension, also, of the 
beauty of the visible things around him ; their fading, 
momentary graces and attractions. His own natural 
susceptibility in this direction, confirmed by experi- 
ence, demands of him an almost exclusive preoccupa- 
tion with the aspects of things ; their aesthetic char- 
acter, as it is called — their revelations to the eye and 
the imagination : not so much because the spectacle of 
these elements in them yields him the largest amount 
of enjoyment, as because to be occupied, in this way, 
with the aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to 
be in real contact with those elements of his own 
nature, and of theirs, which, for him at least, are 
matters of the most real kind of apprehension. As 
other men concentrate themselves on ti'uth of number, 
or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of ap- 
petite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full 
stream of refined sensation ; and in the prosecution 
of this love of beauty, he claims an entire personal 
liberty of heart and mind — liberty, above all, from 
conventional answers to first questions. 

But, without him there is a venerable system of 
sentiment and ideas, widely extended in time and 
place, actually in a kind of impregnable possession 
of human life — a system, which, like some other great 



248 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, 

products of the conjoint efforts of human mind 
through many generations, is rich in the world's 
experience ; so that, in attaching oneself to that, one 
lets in a great tide of that experience, and makes, 
as it were with a single step, a great experience of 
one's own ; with a great, consequent increase to one's 
mind, of color, variety, and relief, in the spectacle 
of men and things. The mere sense of belonging to 
a system — an imperial system or organization — has, 
in itself, the expanding power of a great experience ; 
as some have felt who have been admitted from 
narrower sects into the communion of the Roman 
church ; or as the old Roman citizen felt. It is, we 
might fancy, like the coming into possession of a 
very widely spoken language, with a vast literature, 
which is also the speech of the people we have to 
live among. 

Cyrenaic or Epicurean doctrine, then — the Cyrenai- 
cism with which Marius had come to Rome, or our 
own new Cyrenaicism of the nineteenth century — 
does but need its proper complement. Refer it, as a 
part to the whole <. that larger, well-adjusted system 
of the old moralit}^, through which the better portion 
of mankind strive, in common, towards the realization 
of a better world than the present — give it a modus 
Vivendi, as lawyers say, with that common everyday 
morality, the power of which is continuous in human 
affairs — excise its antinomian usurpations ; and the 
heresy becomes a counsel of perfection. Our Cyrenaic 
finds his special apprehension of the fact of life, amid 
all his own personal color of mind and temper— 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 240 

finds himself again — though it be — but as a single 
element in an imposing system, a wonderful harmony 
of principles, exerting a strange power to sustain — 
to carry him and his effort still onward to perfection, 
when, through one's inherent human weakness, his 
own peculiar source of energy fails him, or his own 
peculiar apprehension becomes obscured for a 
while. 

A wonderful order, actually in possession of the 
world ! — grown over it and into it, inextricably ; 
penetrating into its laws, its very language, its mere 
habits of decorum^ in a thousand half-conscious ways ; 
yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal ; and, 
as such, awakening hope, and an aim, which is iden. 
tical with the one only consistent, aspiration of man- 
kind ! In the apprehension of that, just then, Marius 
seemed to have joined company again with his own 
old self ; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim 
who had come to Rome, with absolute sincerity, on 
the search for perfection. It defined not so much a 
change of practice, as of sympathy — a change, an 
expansion, of sympathy. There was involved in it, 
certainly, a voluntary curtailing of his libert\', in 
concession to the actual manner, the distinctions and 
enactments of that great crowd of admirable spirits, 
who have elected so, and not otherwise, in their con- 
duct of life ; and who are not here to give one, so to 
term it, an " indulgence." But then, under the sup- 
position of their frown, no roses would ever seem 
worth plucking again. The authority they exercised 
was like that of classic taste — an influence so subtle 



250 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

yet so real, and which deiines the loyalty of the 
scholar— or of some beautif td and venerable ritual, in 
which every observance has become spontaneous and 
almost mechanical, yet is found, the more carefully 
one considers it, to have a reasonable significance 
and a real history. 

And Marius saw that he wouid be but an incon- 
sistent Cyrenaic — mistaken in his estimate of values, 
of loss and gain, and untrue to the well-considered 
economy of life which he had brought to Rome with 
him — that some drops of the great cup would fall to 
the ground — if he did not make that concessioUj if 
he did but remain just there. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

MANY PROPHETS AND KINGS HAVE DESIRED TO SEE THE 
THINGS WHICH YE SEE. 

The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the 
vanguard of the mio^htv invadino^ hosts of the fifth 
century. Illusively repressed just now, those con- 
fused movements along the northern boundary of 
the Empii'e were destined to unite triumphantly at 
last, in the barbarism, which, powerless to destroy 
the Christian church, was yet to suppress for a time 
the achieved culture of the pagan world : and with 
this lamentable result, that the kingdom of Clirist 
grew up in a somewhat false alienation from the 
beauty and light of the kingdom of the natural man, 
developing a partly mistaken tradition concerning it, 
and an incapacity, as it miglit almost seem at times, 
for eventual reconciliation with it. Meantime, Italy 
had armed itself once more, in haste; and the im- 
perial brotliers set forth for the Alps. 

Whatever misgiving the Roman people may have 
felt as to the leadership of the younger of them was 
unexpectedly set at rest ; though with some tem- 
porary regret for the loss of wiiat had been, after 

all. a popular figure on the world's stage Travel- 

251 



252 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

ing fraternally in the same litter with Aurelius, 
Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and myste- 
rious disease, and died as he hastened back to Rome. 
His death awoke a swarm of sinister rumors, to 
settle — on Lucilla, jealous, it was said, of Fabia her 
sister, perhaps of Faustina — on Faustina herself, 
who had accompanied the imperial progi'ess, and 
was anxious now to hide a crime of her own — even 
on the elder brother, who, beforehand witli the 
treasonable designs of his colleague, should have 
helped him at supper to a favorite morsel, cut with a 
knife poisoned ingeniously on one only of its sides. 
Aurelius, certainl}", with unfeigned distress, his long 
irritations, so dutifully repressed or disguised, turn- 
ing now into a swingle sentiment of regret for the 
human creature, carried the remains back to Rome, 
and demanded of the Senate a public funeral, with 
a decree for the apotheosis, or canonization, of the 
deceased. 

For three days the body lay in state before the 
Trtbxinal in the Forum, enclosed in an open coffin of 
cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the center 
of a sort of temporary chapel, representing the tem- 
ple of Yenus Gerietrix / while armed soldiers w^atched 
around it, and choirs of chosen voices relieved each 
other in the chanting of hymns and monologues, 
from the great tragedians. At the head of the 
couch were displayed the various personal decora- 
tions which had belonged to Yerus in life. Like all 
the rest of Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face 
whi-ch he had last seen hardly disguised under the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN 253 

hood of a traveling-dress, as the v/earer hurried, at 
nightfall, along one of the streets below the palace 
on some amorous appointment. And unfamiliar as 
he still was with dead faces, he was taken bv sur. 
prise, and touched beyond what he could have thought 
possible, by the piteous change there; even the 
skill of Galen having been not wholly successful in 
the process of embalming. It was as if a brother of 
his own were lying low before him, with that meek 
and helpless expression, which it would have been a 
sacrilege to treat rudel\\ 

Meantime, in the center of the Campus Martlus^ 
within the grove of poplars enclosing the space 
where the body of Augustus had been burnt, the 
great funeral pyre, stuffed with shavings of various 
aromatic woods, had been built up m many stages, 
separated from each other by a light entablature oi* 
Woodwork, and abundantly adorned with tapestries, 
flowers, and images. Upon the top of this pyra- 
midal, or flame-shaped structure, was placed the 
corpse, hidden now under a mountain of gai'lands and 
incense brought by the women, who from the first 
bad had their fondness for the wanton graces of 
th<5 deceased. The dead body was surmounted bv a 
waxen effigy of great size, arrayed in the triumphal 
ornaments; and at last the centurions, whose office 
it was, approached with their torches to ignite the 
pile at its four corners, while the soldiers, in wild 
excitement, ran around it, casting into the flames 
the decorations they had received for acts of valor 
'ander his command. 



254 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

It had been a really heroic order, spoiled a little, 
at the last moment, through the somewhat tawdry 
artifice, by which an eagle — not a very noble or 
youthful specimen of its kind — was made to take 
flight from the perishing remains ; a court chamber- 
lain according to ancient etiquette, subsequently 
making official declaration, before the Senate, that 
the imperial genius had been seen in this way, escap- 
ing from the ashes. And Marius was present when 
the Fathers, duly certified of the fact, by *' acclama- 
tion," muttering their judgment all together, in a 
kind of low, rhythmical chant, decreed — cwlum — 
the privilege of divine rank, to the departed. 

The actual gathering of the ashes in a white cere- 
cloth by the widowed Lucilla, when the last flicker 
had been extinguished by drops of wine ; and the 
conveyance of them to the little cell, already popu- 
lous, in the central mass of tlie sepulcher of Hadrian, 
still in all the splendor of its statues and colon- 
nades, were a matter of private or domestic duty ; 
after the due accomplishment of which Aurelius was 
at liberty to retire for a time into the privacy of his 
beloved apartments on the Palatine. And hither, 
not long afterwards, Marius was summoned a second 
time, to receive from the imperial hands the great 
pile of manuscripts it was to be his business to revise 
and arrange. 

Just one year had passed smce his first visit to 
the palace ; and as he climbed the stairs to-day, the 
great cypresses rocked against the sunless sky, like 
living creatures in pain. He had to traverse a long 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. Onfi 

subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the 
imperial apartments, and in our own day, amid the 
ruin of almost all else around it, as smooth and fresh 
as if the carpets had but just been removed from the 
floor after the return of the emperor from the shows. 
It was here, on such an occasion, that the emperor 
Caliguhi, at the age of twenty-nine, had come by his 
end ; his assassins gliding through it upon him, while 
he stayed yet a little while longer to watch the 
exercises of a party of noble youths at play. As 
Marius waited, a second time, in the little red room, 
in the house of the chief chamberlain, curious to look 
once more at its painted walls — the very place into 
which the assassins were said to have turned for con- 
cealment after the murder — he could all but see the 
figure, which, in its surrounding light and darkness, 
had always seemed to him perhaps the most melan- 
choly in the whole history of Rome. He called to 
mind the greatness of that early promise and popular- 
ity — the stupefying height of irresponsible power, 
from which, after all, only men's viler side had been 
clearly visible — the incipient overthrow of reason — 
the irredeemable memory ; and still, above all, the 
beautiful head in which the noble lines of the family 
of Augustus were united to, he knew not what ex- 
pression of fineness and sensibility, not theirs, and 
for the like of which one must pass onward to the 
Antonines. A legitimate popular hatred was careful 
to destrov the semblance of it, wherever it could be 
found ; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a 
wonderful finish and style, preserved in the Museum 



256 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

of the Capitol, is still one of the very finest art-treas« 
ures of Rome, Had the very seal of empire upon 
those somber brows, reflected to him from his mirror, 
suggested his mad attempts upon the liberty, the 
dignity of humanity — hnmanity ! what hast thou 
done to me that I should so despise thee f — And yet 
misfht not all that be indeed the true meaning' of 
kingship, if the world would have one man to reign 
i>ver it ? that — or, some incredible, surely never to 
be realized, height of disinterestedness, in a king 
who should be the servant of all, quite at the other 
extreme of the practical dilemma involved in such a 
position. It was not till some time after his death 
that his body was decently interred by the sisters he 
had driven into exile. Fraternity of feeling had not 
been an invariable feature in the incidents of Eoman 
story — one long Yicus Sceleratus^ from its tirst dim 
foundation in a fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a 
common deliverance so touching — had not almost 
every step in it some gloomy memory of unnatural 
violence? Romans did well to fancv the traitress 
Tarpeia still "green in earth,'' and established on a 
throne, at the roots of the Capitoline rock. If in 
truth the religion of Rome was everywhere in it, 
like the perfume of the funeral incense still in the 
air Marius was breathing, so also was the memory of 
its crimes, prompted by a hyjwcritical cruelty, down 
to the erring, or not erring, vestal, calmly buried 
alive there, only eighty years ago, under Domitian. 
It was with a sense of relief that Marius found 
himself in the presence of Aurelius, whose look and 



MARIU9 THE EPICUREAN. 257 

gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered, made 
him smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts 
just then, although since his first visit to the palace 
a great change had passed over it. The clear day- 
light found its way now into empty rooms. To raise 
funds for the war, Aurelius, his luxurious brother 
being now no more, had determined to sell by auction 
the accumulated treasures of the imperial household. 
The works of art, and the dainty furniture, had been 
removed, and were now " on view " in the Forum, to 
be the delight or dismay, for many wrecks to come, 
of the large public of those who were curious in such 
things. In such wise had Aurelius come to that 
condition of philosophic detachment, which he had 
affected as a boy, when he had hardly been persuaded 
to wear warm clothing, and to sleep otherwise than 
on the bare floor. But, in the empty house, the man 
of mind, who had ahvays made so much of the 
pleasures of philosophic contemplation, felt freer 
in thought than ever. He had been reading, Avith 
less self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of 
Plato, those passages which describe the life of the 
king-philosophers— like that of hired servants in 
their own house— who, possessed of the " gold un- 
defiled " of intellectual vision, forego so cheerfully all 
other riches. It was one of his happy days ; one of 
those rare days, when, almost with none of the 
effort otherwise so constant with him, his thoughts 
came rich and full, converging in a mental view, as 
exhilarating to him as the prospect of some wideex- 
panse of landscape to another man's bodily eye. 



258 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to those 
suggestions, conveyed by philosophic reason to an 
alert imagination — suggestions of a possible open 
country, commencing just upon tl^e verge where all 
actual experience leaves off, but which experience, 
one's own and not another's, may one day occupy. 
In fact, he was seeking strength for himself, in his 
own way, before he started for that ambiguous 
earthly warfare which was to occupy the rest of his 
life. " Ever remember this," he writes, " that a 
happ\' life depends not on many things — b> ohyiaToi^ 
zerraf." And to-day, committing himself with a 
steady effort of volition to the mere silence of the 
great empty apartments, he might be said to have 
escaped (according to Plato's promise to those who 
live closely with philosophy) from the evils of the 
world. 

In his " conversations with himself " Marcus Aure- 
lius speaks often of a City on high^ of which all other 
cities beside are but single habitations. It was from 
him that Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse, had 
borrowed the expression : and he certainly meant by 
it more than the whole commonwealth of Rome, 
even in any idealization of it, however remote. In- 
corporate somehow with the actual city, whose 
goodly stones were lying beneath his gaze, it was 
also identical with that constitution of universal 
nature, by a devout contemplation of which it was 
possible for man to associate himself to the con- 
sciousness of God. It \vas in that ven: liome that 
he had taken up his rest for awhile on this day, de- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 259 

libera tely feeding bis thoughts on the better air of 
it, as another might have gone for mental renewal 
to a favorite villa. 

"Men seek retirement in country-houses, at the 
seaside, on the mountains ; and you have yourself as 
much fondness for such places as another. Still, 
there is no proof of culture in that ; for the privilege 
is yours of retiring into yourself whensoever you 
please — into that little farm of one's own mind, 
where a silence so profound may be enjoyed." — 
That it could make these retreats, was a plain con- 
sequence of the prerogative, the kingship of the mind 
over its own conditions, its real, inherent liberty. — 
"It is in th}^ power to think as thou wilt: — The es- 
sence of things is in thy thoughts about them : — All 
is opinion — conception : — N^o man can be hindered 
by another : — What is outside thy circle of thought 
is nothing at all to it ; hold to this, and you are safe : 
One thing is needful — to live close to the divine 
genius within thee, and minister thereto worthily." 

And the first point in this true ministry, or culture, 
was to keep one's soul in a condition of pure indif- 
ference and calm. Plow continually had public 
claims, the claims of other persons, with their rough 
angularities of character, broken in upon him, the 
shepherd of the flock. But after all, he had at least 
this privilege he could not part with, of thinking as 
he would : and it was well, now and then, by an ef- 
fort of will, to indulge it for a time, under an artifi- 
cial and systematic direction. The duty of thus 
making discreet, systematic use of the power of 



260 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

imaginative vision for the purposes of spiritual 
culture, " since the soul takes color from its fantasies," 
is a point he has frequently insisted on. 

The influence of these seasonable meditations — a 
symbol, or sacrament, because an intenser form, of 
the soul's own proper and natural life — would re- 
main upon it, perhaps for many days. There were 
experience she could not forget, intuitions beyond 
price, he had come by in this way, which were al- 
most like the breaking of a physical light upon his 
mind ; as the great Augustus was said to have seen 
a mysterious physical light, over there, upon the 
summit of the Capitol, where the altar of the Sibyl 
now stood. With a prayer, therefore, for inward 
quiet, and conformity to the divine reason, he read 
over some select passages from Plato, which bear 
upon the harmony of the reason, in all its forms, 
with itself " Could there be cosmos, that wonderful, 
reasonable order, in him, and nothing but disorder 
in the world without ? " It was from that question 
he had passed on to the vision, of system, of the 
reasonable order, not in nature, but in the condition 
of human affairs the Celestial City, Uranopolis^ 
Callijpolis in which, a consciousness of the divine 
will being everywhere realized, there would be, 
among other felicitous differences from this lower 
visible order, no more quite hopeless death, of men, 
or children, or of their affections. He had tried to- 
day, as nev^er before, to make the most of this vision 
of a new Rome ; to realize it as distinctly as he 
could ; and, as it were, to find his way along its 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 261 

streets, ere he went down into a world so irksomely 
different, to make his practical effort towards it, 
with a soul full of pity for men as they were. How- 
ever distinct the mental image of that might have 
been to him, witii the descent of one flight of steps 
from the palace into the marlcet-place below, it would 
have retreated again, as if at touch of anuigic wand, 
be3^ondthe utmost verge of the horizon. But it had 
been, actually, in his clearest vision of it, a confused 
place, Avitli but a recognizable tower or entry, here 
or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose new 
expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no 
means read. Plato, indeed, had been able to articu- 
late, to see, in thought at least, his ideal city. But 
just because Aurelius had passed beyond Plato, in 
the scope of the philanthropy — the Philadelphia — 
he supposed there, he had been unable really to find 
his way about it. Ah ! after all, according to Plato 
himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this, 
his heart's desire, no place his soul had ever visited, 
in any region of the old world's achievements. Pie. 
had but divined, by a kind of generosity of spirit, 
the void place, which another experience than his 
must fill. 

Yet Marius noted the wonderful expression of 
peace, of quiet pleasure, on the countenance of Aure- 
lius, as he received from him the rolls of fine clear 
manuscript, fancying the emperor had been really 
i>ccupied with the famous prospect towards the Sabine 
and Alban hills, from those lofty windows. 



CHAPTER XYIII. 

"the ceremony of the dart." 

The ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aure- 
lius, ideas of large generalization (it must be repeated) 
have often induced, in those over whose intellects 
they have had real power, a chillness of heart. It 
was the distinction of Aurelius that he was capable 
of harmonizing them with the chai'ities, the amenities^ 
one might almost say, of a humorist ; as also witb 
the popular religion and its many gods. Those vasty 
conceptions of the later Greek philosophy had in 
them, in truth, the germ of a sort of austerely 
opinionative " natural theology," as it is called ; and 
how often has that led to a socinian drvness — a hard 
contempt of everything in religion, which touches 
the senses, or charms the imagination, or really con- 
cerns the affections. Aurelius had made his own the 
secret of passing, naturally, and with no violence to 
his thought, to and fro, between the richly colored 
and romantic relioion of those old or-ods who had 
been still human beings, and a somewhat fatalistic 
speculation upon the impassive, universal soul — circle 
whose circumference was everywhere and center 

nowhere — of which a series of purely logical neces- 
262 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 263 

sities had evolved the formula. As in many another 
instance, those traditional pieties of the place and 
the hour had been derived by him from his mother 
— Ttapd rr;? fXTfTpo^ 'o Oeoffe^i^. Purified, as all such 
religion of concrete time and place needs to be puri- 
fied, b}'^ a frequent confronting with the ideal of god- 
head, revealed by that innate theistic sense, in the 
possession of which Aurelius differed from the relig- 
ious people around him, it was the ground of many 
a sociability with their simpler souls; and, for him- 
self, a consolation, whenever the wings of his own 
soul flagged, in the trying atmosphere of intellectual 
speculation. A host of companions, guides, helpers, 
about him from of old time, " the very court and 
company of heaven," objects for him of personal 
reverence and affection — their supposed presence de- 
termined the character of much of his daily life, and 
might prove the last stay of his human nature at its 
weakest. " In every time and place," he had said, 
" it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour 
religiously : at all seasons worship the gods." And 
when he said '' worship the gods," he did it as strenu- 
ously as all besides. 

And yet, here again, how often must he have ex- 
perienced disillusion, or even a revolt of feeling, at 
the contact with coarser natures to which his re- 
ligious conclusions exposed him. At the beginning 
of the year a. d. 173 public anxiety was as great as 
ever ; and, as before, it brought people's supersti- 
tion into unreserved play. For seven days the im- 
ages of the old gods, and of some of the graver new 



264 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

ones, lay solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed 
in all their ornaments, each one in his separate rest- 
ing-place, amid lights and burning incense, while the 
crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited 
them ; with offerings of flowers to this or that par- 
ticular divinity, according to the devotion of each. 

But supplementing these old, official observances, 
the very wildest gods had their share of w^orship, 
like some strange creatures with strange secrets 
startled abroad into the open day. The delirious 
sort of Avorship of which Marius was a spectator in 
the streets of Rome, during the seven dsLVs of the 
Lectisteniium, reminded him, now and again, of an 
observation of Apuleius — it was " as if the presence 
of the gods did not do men good, but weakened or 
disordered them." Some jaded women of fashion, 
especially, found in certain oriental devotions, at 
once a relief for their tearful souls and an opportu- 
nity for personal display ; preferring this or that 
mystery, chiefly because the attire it required suited 
their peculiar style of beauty. And one morning 
Marius encountered an extraordinary crimson object, 
borne along in a litter, through an excited crowd — 
the famous courtesan Benedicta, still fresh from the 
bath of blood to which she had submitted herself, 
sitting below the scaffold where the victims provided 
for the purpose were slaughtered by the priests. 
Even on the last day of the solemnity, when the 
emperor himself performed one of the oldest cere- 
monies of the Roman religion, this fantastic piety 
asserted itself. There were victims enough, cer- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 2G5 

tainlj, brought from the choice pastures of the 
Sabine mountains, and led around the city they 
were to die for, in almost continuous procession, 
covered with flowers and well-nigh worried to death 
before the time by the crowds pressing supersti- 
tiously to touch them. But some old-fashioned 
Romans, in these exceptional circumstances, de- 
manded something more than that, in the way of a 
human sacrifice, after the old pattern ; as when, not 
so long since, some Gauls or Greeks had been buried 
alive in the Forum. At least, human blood should 
be shed : and it was through a wild multitude of 
fanatics, cutting their flesh with whips and knives 
and ardently licking up the crimson stream, that the 
emperor repaired to the temple of Bellona, and in 
solemn symbolic act cast the blood-stained spear, or 
" dart," which was preserved there, towards the 
enemv's country — towards that unknown world of 
German homes, still warm, as some thought, under 
the faint northern twilight, with those innocent af- 
fections of which Romans had lost the sense ; and 
the ruin of which (so much was clear, amid all 
doubts of abstract right or wrong on either side) 
was involved in what Aurelius was then preparing ; 
with — Yes ! the gods be thanked for that achieve- 
ment of an invigorating philosophy ! — almost with 
a light heart. 

For, in truth, that departure, really so difficult, for 
which Marcus Aurelius had needed to brace himself 
so strenuously, came to test the power of a long- 
studied theory of practice : and it was the develop. 



266 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

nient of this theory — literally, a thedria^ a view, an 
intuition— of the most important facts, and still 
more important possibilities, concerning man in the 
world — that Marius now discovered, almost as if by 
accident, below the dry surface of the manuscripts 
3ntrusted to him. The great purple rolls contained 
— statistics, a general historical account ol' the 
writer's own time, and an exact diary : all alike, 
though in three different degrees of approach to the 
writer's own personal experience, laborious, formal, 
self-suppressing. All this was for the instruction of 
the public ; and a part of it has, perhaps, found its 
way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for 
the especial guidance of his son Commodus that he 
bad permitted himself to break out, here and there, 
into reflections upon what was passing, into conver- 
sations with the reader. And then, as if put off his 
guard in that way, there had escaped into the heavy 
statistical matter, of which the main portion was 
composed, morsels of his conversations with himself. 
It was the romance of a soul (to be traced only in 
hints, wayside notes, quotations froir older masters) 
as it were in lifelong, and often bafti^a search after 
some vanished or elusive golden fleece or Hesperi- 
dean fruit-trees, or some mysterious light of doctrine, 
ever retreating before him. A man, he JT.ad seemed 
to Marius from the first, of two lives, as we say. Of 
what nature, he had wondered sometimes, »^» for in- 
stance, when he had interrupted his musings in the 
empty palace, might be that placid inward gt^»t or 
inhabitant, who from amid the preoccupations oi the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 267 

man of practical affairs looked out sur|)rised at the 
things and faces about it. Here, under the tame 
surface of a would-be life of busioess, Marius dis- 
covered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous, 
irrepressible self -revelation of a soul as delicate as 
his own — a soul for which conversation with itself 
was a necessity of existence. Marius had ahvays 
suspected that the feeling of such necessity was a 
peculiarity of his. Here, certainly, was another, in 
this respect like himself : and again he seemed to 
detect the advent of some new, or changed spirit 
into the world, mystic, and inward, and very dif- 
ferent from that wholly external and objective habit 
of life, with w^hich the old classic soul had satisfied 
itself : and his purely literary curiosity w^as greatly 
stimulated by this example of a book of self-por- 
traiture. It was really the position of the modern 
essayist — creature of efforts rather than achieve, 
ments, in the matter of apprehending truth — but at 
least conscious of lights by the way, which he must 
needs acknowledge. AVhat seemed to underlie it 
was the desire to make the most of every outward 
or inward experience, to perpetuate and display what 
was so fleeting, in a kind of instinctive, pathetic 
protest against the imperial writer's own theory — - 
that theory of i\\Q perpetual flux of all things — from 
of old so plausible to Marius. 

Besides, there was a special doctrinal, or moraV 
significance in the making of such conversation with 
oneself at all. The reasonable spark, the Logos in 
man, is common to him with the gods — xoivo^: abruf 



268 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

tf*o^ rohy^ 0sou<^ — cii/n diis convmunis. That might 
seem but the truism of certain schools of philosophy : 
in Aurelius it was clearly an original and lively 
apprehension. There could be no inward conver- 
sation with oneself like that, unless there were in- 
deed some one aware of our actual feelings and 
*;houghts, pleased or displeased at one's disposition 
of oneself, Fronto too, the learned professor, could 
enounce that proposition of the reasonable community 
Oetween men and God, in many different ways. 
But then, he was a cheerful man, and Aurelius a 
singularly sad one ; and what to Fronto was but a 
doctrine, or a mere motive of rhetoric, was to the 
other a consolation. He walks and talks, for a 
spiritual refreshment, without which he would faint 
bv the wav, with what to the other is but a matter 
of philosophic eloquence. 

In performing those public religious acts, Marcus 
Aurelius had ever seemed like one taking his part in 
some high, real, process, a real thing done, with 
more than the actually visible assistants about him. 
Here, in a hundred marginal flowers of feeling and 
language, happy new phrases of his own like the 
impromptus of a real conversation, or those quo- 
tations from other older masters of the inward life, 
takino: new sio-nificance from the chances of such 
intercourse, was the record of his communion with 
that eternal reason, which was also his own proper 
self — with the intelligible companion, whose taber- 
nacle was in the intelligence of men ; — the journal 
)f his daily commerce with that. 



MxVRIUS THE EPICUREAN. 269 

Chance or Providence ! Chance : or Wisdom — 
one with nature and man ; reaching from end to end, 
through all time and all existence, orderly disposing 
all things, according to fixed periods — as he describes 
it, in terms very like certain well-known words of 
the book of Wisdom — those are the ''fenced oppo- 
sites," of the speculative dilemma, the tragic embar- 
ras^ of which Aurelius cannot too often remind him- 
self as the summary of man's situation in the world. 
If there be such a provident soul " behind the veil," 
truly, even to him, even in the most intimate of those 
conversations, it has never yet spoken with any quite 
irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet that specu- 
lative choice, as he has found it, is on the whole a 
matter of will — " 'Tis in thy power," again, here 
too, " to think as thou wilt." And for his part he 
has made his choice and is true to it. " To the better 
of two things, if thou findest that, turn with thy 
whole heart : eat and drink ever of the best before 
thee." "Wisdom," says that other disciple of the 
Sapiential philosophy, *' hath mingled her wine, she 
hath also prepared herself a table." — Too dpiffzob 
dic6Xau£ — " partake ever of Her best ! " And what 
Marius, peeping now very closely upon the intimacies 
of that singular mind, found a thing actually pathetic 
and affecting, was the manner of his bearing as in 
the presence of this supposed guest ; so elusive, so 
jealous of any broad manifestation of himself, so tax- 
ing to one's faith, never allowing one to lean frankly 
upon him and be wholly at rest. Only, he would 
do his own part, at least, in maintaining the con- 



270 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

stant fitness, the quiet and sweetness of the guesl- 
charaber. Seeming to vary with the intellectual 
fortune of the hour, from being the plainest account 
of ex})erience, to a sheer fantasy, believed almost 
because it was impossible, — that one hope was, at 
all events, sufficient to make men's common pleasures, 
and common ambition, above all their commonest 
vices, seem very petty indeed, too petty to know 
of ; and bred in him a kind of inagnificeiice of charac- 
ter, in the old Greek sense of the term ; a temper in- 
compatible with any merely plausible advocacy of 
his convictions, or merely superficial thoughts about 
anything whatever, or talk about other people, or 
speculation as to what was passing in their so visibly 
little souls, or much talk of any kind, however clever 
or graceful. A soul thus disposed had already entered 
into the better life — was indeed in some sort a priest^ 
a minister of the gods. Hence, his constant circum- 
spection ; a close watching of his soul, almost unique 
in the ancient world. — Before all things examine 
into thyself : sir ice to he at hotne with thyself ! — 
Marius a sympathetic witness of all that, might 
almost seem to have foreseen monasticism itself, in 
the prophetic future. With this mystic companion 
he had gone a step onward, out of the merely OD- 
jective pagan world. Here was already a master in 
that craft of self-direction, which was then coming 
to play so large a part in the human mind, at the 
prompting of the Christian church. 

Yet it was in truth a very melancholy service, a 
service upon which one must x^^^^^^i move about. 



MARIUS I^HE EPICUREAN. 271 

solemn, serious, depressed : with the hushed footsteps 
of people who move about a house of mourning where 
a dead body is lying. That was an impression which 
occurred to Marius, again and again, as he read, with 
the growing sense of some profound dissidence from 
his author. By certain, quite traceable links of 
association, he was reminded, in spite of the moral 
beauty of the philosophic emperor's ideas, how- he 
had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the gladiatorial 
shows. For, actually, his contemplations had made 
him of a sad heart ; inducing in him that sadness— 
Tristitia — which even monkish moralists have held 
to be of the nature of mortal sin, akin to the mortal 
sin of— Desidia—ln2iciW\iy or Sloth. Resignation, 
a somber resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of 
the burden of a sad heart— Yes ! that was in the 
situation of an honest thinker upon the world. Only, 
here there was too much of a tame acquiescence in it. 
And there could be no true Theodicee in that ; no 
real accommodation of the world as it is, to the divine 
pattern of the Logos over against it. It amounted 
to a tolerance of evil. 
The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst 

but little understand, yet prospereth on the journey : 
If thou sufferest nought contrary to nature, there can be 

nought of evil with thee there : 

If thou hast done anything in harmony with that reason 

in which men are communicant with the gods, there also 

can be nought of evil with thee— nothing to be afraid of: 

Whatever is. is right ; as from the hand of one dispensing 

to every man according to his desert : 
If reason fulfil *' - Dart in things, what more dost thou re- 
quire? 



272 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits? 
That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the 

whole : 
The profit of the whole, that was sufficient ! 

Those were some of the links in a train of thought 
really generous. Only, actually, its forced and yet 
too facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, 
had no secret of genuine cheerfulness in it ; it left a 
weight upon the spirits. No ! with that weight un- 
lifted there could indeed be no genuine Theodicee, no 
real justification of the ways of Heaven to man. 
" Let thine air be cheerful," he had said ; and, with 
an effort did at times himself attain to that serenity 
of aspect, which surely ought to accompany, as their 
outward flower and favor, assumptions like those. 
Still, what in Aurelius was a passing expression, was 
in Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) 
nature, and a veritable physiognomy. It was in fact, 
we may say, nothing less than the joy which Dante 
apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect ; the 
outward expression of which, like a physical light 
upon human faces, from the land which is very far 
off, we may trace from Giotto, and even earlier, to 
its consummation in the purer and better work of 
Raffaelle, — the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, the 
blitheness of those who had been indeed delivered 
from death, of which the utmost degree of that famed 
Greek blitheness or HeiterTteit is but a transitory 
gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth. 
And vet, in Cornelius it was certainly united with 
the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 273 

as real as an aching in the head or heart, which one 
instinctively desires to have cured ; an enemy with 
whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully 
visible, in a thousand forms — in the apparent wast- 
ing of men's gifts in an early, or even in a late grave ; 
in the death, as such, of men, and even of animals ; 
in the disease and pain of the body. 

And there was another point of dissidence between 
Aurelius and his reader. — The philosophic Aurelius 
was a despiser of the body. Since it is " the pecuhar 
privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be 
proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither 
sensation nor passion, both of which are of animal and 
inferior quality, to break in upon her ; " it must follow 
that the true aim of the spirit will be to treat the 
body — 6 (TCD/xaruorr vexpu^ — evcr a carcass rather than 
a companion — as a thing really dead, a corpse; 
and actually to promote its dissolution. And here 
again, in opposition to an inhumanity like this, pre- 
senting itself to that young reader as nothing less 
than a kind of sin against nature, the person of Corne- 
lius sanctioned or justified the delight Marius had 
always had in the body ; at first, as but one of the 
consequences of his material or sensualistic philos- 
ophy. To Cornelius, the body of man was unmis- 
takably, as a later seer terms it, the one temple in 
the world (" we touch Heaven when we lay our hand 
upon a human body " ), and the proper object of a 
sort of worshi]), or sacred service, in which the very 
finest gold might have its seemliness and due symbolic 

use — Ah ! and of what awe-stricken pity or reverence 
i8 



274o MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

also, in its dejection, down even to the perishing 
white bones of the poor man's grave ! 

Some flaw in vision, thought Marius, must be in- 
volved in the philosopher's contempt for it — some 
disease in thought, or moral dulness ; leading logic- 
ally to what seemed to him the strangest of ail the 
emperor's inhumanities, the humor of the suicide; 
for which there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania 
in the world. " 'Tis part of the business of life," he 
read, " to lose it handsomelv " — On due occasion 
** one might give life the slip " — The mental and moral 
powers might flag with one ; and then it were a fair 
question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave 
had not come — " Thou canst leave this prison when 
thou wilt. Go forth boldly ! " — Just there, in the 
mere capacity to entertain that question at all, there 
was what Marius, whose heart must always leap up 
in loyal gratitude for the mere, physical sunshine, if 
for nothing else, touching him as it touched the flies 
in the air, could not away with. In that, surely, was 
the sign of some distortion in the natural power of 
apprehension. It was the attitude, the melancholy 
intellectual attitude, of one who might be greatly 
mistaken in things — who might make the greatest of 
mistakes. 

A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, 
and even the weakness of others : — of that, Marius 
had certainly found the trace, as a confidant of the 
emperor's conversations with himself, in spite of 
those jarring inhumanities, his pretension to a stoical 
indiff'erence, and the many difficulties of his manner 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 275 

of writing. He found it again not long afterwards, 
in still stronger evidence, in this way. As lie read 
one morning early, there slipped from the rolls of 
manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor's super- 
scription, which might well be of importance, and he 
felt bound to deliver it at once in person ; Aurelius 
being then absent from Rome in one of his favorite 
retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with 
his young children, before his departure for the war. 
A long day passed as Marius crossed the Campagna 
on horseback, pleased b}^ the random autumn lights 
bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture, the 
shepherds in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, 
tower and villa : and it was long after dark that he 
mounted the steep street of the little hill-town to 
the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd 
mixture of stillness and excitement about the place. 
Lights burned at the windows. It seemed that 
numerous visitors were within, for the courtyard 
was crowded with litters and horses in waiting. For 
the moment, indeed, all larger cares, even the cares 
of war, of late so heavy a pressure, had been for- 
gotten in what was passing with the little Annius 
Yerus; who for his part had forgotten his toys, and 
had been lying all day across the knees of his mother, 
as a mere child's ear-ache grew rapidh^ to an alarm- 
ing sickness with great manifest agony, only sus- 
pended a little, from time to time, as he passed from 
very weariness into a few minutes of unconscious- 
ness. The country surgeon called in, had removed 
the imposthume with the knife. There had been a 



276 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

great effort to bear this operation, for the terrified 
child, hardly persuaded to submit himself, when his 
pain was at its worst, and even more for the parents. 
At last, amid a crowd of pupils pressing in with him, 
as the custom was, to watch the proceedings in the 
sick-room, the great Galen had arrived, only to pro- 
nounce the thing done visibly useless, the patient 
now fainting into longer intervals of delirium. And 
it was just then, through the pressure of the depart- 
ing crowd, that Marius w^as forced into being privy 
to a grief, the desolate face of which went deep into 
his memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child 
away — quite conscious now, but with a touching ex- 
pression of helplessness and defeat upon it — pressed 
closely to his bosom, as if yearning just then for 
one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one 
with it in its obscure distress. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

PARATUM COR MEUM, DEUS ! PARATUM COR MEUlVr. 

The emperor required only that the Senate should 
decree the erection of images, memorial of the dead 
child ; that a golden image of him should be carried, 
with the other images, in the great procession of the 
Circus, and that his name should be inserted in the 
Hymn of the Salian Priests : and so, stifling private 
grief, without further delay set forth for the war. 

True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, 
had understood it, was essentially of the nature of 
a service. — If so be, you can discover a mode of life 
more desirable than the being a king, for those who 
shall be kings ; then, the true Ideal of the State 
will become a possibility ; and not otherwise. And 
if a life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if 
philosophy really concludes in an ecstas}^ affording 
its full fruition to the entire nature of man ; then, 
for certain elect souls at least, a mode of life will 
have been discovered more desirable than beino^ a 
king. By love or fear you might induce such an 
one to forego his privilege ; to take upon him the 
distasteful task of governing other men, or even of 
leading them to victory in battle : and bv the verv 



278 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

conditions of its tenure, bis dominion would be 
wbolly a ministry to otbers ; he would have taken 
upon him " the form of a servant ; " he would be 
reigning for the well-being of others, not for himself. 
The true king, the rightful king, would be Saint 
Lewis, exiling himself from the better land and its 
perfected company — so real a thing to him, as real 
and definite as the pictured pages of his psalter — to 
arbitrate, or to take part in, men's quarrels about 
the transitory appearances of things. In a lower 
degree — lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic 
dream is lower than any Christian vision — the true 
king would be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the 
meditation of books, to be the leader of the Homan 
people in peace, and still more, in war. 

To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the 
visions, however dim, which this mood brought with 
it, were pleasant enough, together with those endear- 
ments of home, to make his public rule nothing less 
than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato's re- 
quirements, now consummated in his setting forth 
to the campaign on the Danube. That it was such 
a sacrifice was to Marius a visible fact, as he saw 
him ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all 
the pageantry of an imperial departure, but with 
the air less of a triumphant and self-willed leader 
than of one in some way or other defeated. Through 
the fortunes of the subsequent years, passing and 
repassing so inexplicably from side to side, the 
rumors of which reached him amid his own quiet 
studies, Marius seemed always to see that central 



MARIUS THE t:PICUREAN. 279 

image, with its habitual hue of dejection grown 
now to an expression of positive suifering ; all the 
stranger from its contrast with the magnificent 
armor worn by the emperor on that occasion, as it 
had been worn by his predecessor Hadrian. 

Totus et argento contextus et auro — • 

clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old 
divinely constructed armor of which Homer speaks, 
but without its miraculous lightsomeness — he looked 
out baffled, moribund, laboring, like a comfortless 
shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction 
of the labors of a Hercules through those mist-laden 
Northern confines of the civilized world. It was as 
if the familiar soul which had been so friendlv dis- 
posed towards him were actually departed to Hades ; 
and when he read his Conversations afterwards, 
though he did not materially change his judgment 
of them, it was nevertheless with the allowance we 
make for the dead. The memory of that suffering 
image, while it certainly deepened his adhesion to 
what he could accept in those remains of Aurelius, 
added a strange pathos to what must seem the 
writer's mistakes. What, after all, had been the 
meaning of that incident, accepted as so fortunate 
an omen long ago, when the Prince, then a little 
child much younger than was usual, had stood in 
ceremony among the priests of Mars and flung his 
crown of flowers with the rest at the sacred image 
reclining on the Pulvinarf The other crowns 
lodged themselves here or there: when, 1^0 ! the 



280 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

crown thrown by Aurelius, the youngest of them, 
alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if placed 
there by a careful hand ! He was still young, again, 
when on the day of his adoption by Antoninus Pius 
he saw himself in a dream, with as it were shoulders 
of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found them 
more capable than shoulders of flesh. Yet he was 
now well-nigh fifty years of age, and with two- 
thirds of life behind him was setting out upon a 
labor which was to fill the remainder of it with anx- 
iety — a labor for which he had perhaps no capacity, 
certainly no taste. 

That ancient suit of armor was almost the only 
object which Aurelius now possessed out of all those 
much cherished articles of vertu collected by the 
Caesars, making the imperial residence like a magnifi- 
cent museum. For not men only were needed for 
the war, so that it was necessary, to the great dis- 
gust alike of timid persons and of the lovers of sport, 
to arm the gladiators : money also was lacking. Ac- 
cordingly, at the sole motion of Aurelius himself, 
unwilling that the public burden should be further 
increased, especially on the part of the poor, the 
whole of the imperial ornaments and furniture, a 
sumptuous collection of gems formed by Hadrian, 
with many works of the most famous painters and 
sculptors, even the precious ornaments of the impe- 
rial chapel or Lara^ium^ and the wardrobe of the 
empress Faustina, who seems to have borne the loss 
without a murmur, were exposed for public auction. 
^' These treasures," said Aurelius* " like all else 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 281 

that I possess, belong by right to the Senate and 
people." Was it not a characteristic of the true 
kings in Plato that they had in their houses nothing 
of their own ? Connoisseurs had a keen delight in 
the mere reading of the Pri^tor'^s list of the property 
for sale. For two months the learned in these 
matters were daily occupied in the appraising of the 
embroidered hangings, the choice articles of per- 
sonal use selected for preservation by each succeed- 
ing age, the great outlandish pearls from Hadrian's 
favorite cabinet, the marvelous plate lying safe be- 
hind the pretty iron wickerwork of the shops in the 
goldsmiths' quarter. Meantime ordinary persons 
might inspect with interest objects which had been 
as daily companions to people so far above and re- 
mote from them — things so fine also in material and 
workmanship as to seem, with their antique and del- 
icate air, a worthy survival of the grand bygone 
eras — like select thoughts or utterances, embodying 
the very spirit of the vanished past. The town be- 
came more pensive than ever over old fashions. 

The pleasurable excitement of this last act of 
preparation for the great war being over, all Rome 
seemed to settle down into a singular quiet, likely 
to last long, as though bent only on watching from 
afar the languid, somewhat uneventful course of the 
contest itself. Marius took advantage of it as an 
opportunity for still closer study than of old ; only 
now and then going out to one of his favorite spots 
on the Alban or the Sabine hills, for a quiet even 
greater than that of Eome^ in the country air. 0» 



282 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

one of those occasions, as if bv the favor of an in- 
visible power, withdrawing some unsuspected cause 
of oppression from around him, he enjoyed a quite 
unusual sense of self-possession — the possession of bis 
own best and happiest self. After some gloomy 
thoughts overnight, he had awoke in the morning sun- 
light, full, in his entire refreshment, of that almost 
religious appreciation of sleep, the graciousness of its 
influence on men's spirits, which had made the old 
Greeks conceive of it as a god. It w^as like one of those 
old joyful wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer 
and rarer with him, and looked back upon wnth 
much reo^ret as a measure of advancino: ao:e. In 
fact, the last bequest of this serene sleep had been a 
dream, in which, as once before, he had overheard 
those he loved best pronouncing his name very pleas- 
antly, as they passed through the rich sunlight and 
shadow of a summer morning, along the pavement 
of a city — Ah ! fairer far than Rome ! In a moment, 
as he awoke, a dejection which of late had settled 
heavily upon him was lifted away as if by the 
motion of physical air. 

That flawless serenity, better than the most pleas- 
urable excitement, but so easily ruffled by chance 
collisions even with things or persons, he had begun 
to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to be 
wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards 
Tibur, under the early sunshine ; the old yellow 
marble of its villas glittering all the way before him 
on the hillside. Why might he not hold that serenity 
ever at command ? — he asked himself — expert, as he 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 283 

had at last come to be, in the art to setting the house 
of his thoughts in order. " 'Tis in thy power to 
think as thou wilt : " he repeated to himself — most 
serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by 
these imperial conversations ! — " -Tis in thy power to 
think as thou wilt." And were those cheerful, so- 
ciable beliefs he had there seen so much of (that bold 
selection, for instance, of the hypothesis of an eternal 
friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a me- 
chanical and material order, yet only just behind it 
and ready perhaps even now to break through), after 
all, perhaps, really a matter of choice, and dependent 
on a deliberate act of volition on his part ? Were 
they doctrines one might take for granted, generously 
take for granted — and led along by them, at first as 
but well-defined hopes, grow at last into the corre- 
sponding intellectual certitude ? " It is the truth 1 
seek " — he had read — " the truth, by which no one," 
gray and depressing as it might seem, " was ever 
really injured." And yet, on the other hand, the 
imperial wayfarer, he had been able to go along with 
so far on his pilgrimage, let fall many things con- 
cerning the practicability of a forced, constructive. 
methodical assent to principles or dogmas, which one 
could not do without. Were there (as the expres- 
sion d.\>aicx(iia — which One could not do without — • 
seemed to hint) opinions, without w^iich life itself 
was almost impossible, and which had their sufficient 
ground of evidence in that fact ? Experience cer- 
tainly taught that, as with regard to the sensible 
world he could attend or not, almost at will, to this 



284 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

or that color, this or that train of sounds, amid the 
whole tumult of sound and color, so it was also, for 
a well-trained intelligence, in regard to the hum of 
voices which besiege the inward no less than the 
outward ear. Might it be not otherwise with those 
various and competing, permissible hypotheses, 
which, in that open field for hypothesis — one's own 
actual ignorance of the origin and tendencA^ of our 
being — present themselves so importunately, some 
of them with so emphatic a reiteration, through all 
the mental changes of the various ages ; present 
themselves as instinctive reflections of the facts of 
experience ? Might the Will itself be an organ of 
knowledge, of vision ? 

On this dav, certainlv, no mvsterious ligrht, no 
irresistiblv leadino- hand from afar reached him ; 
only, the peculiarly tranquilizing influence with 
which it had begun increased steadily upon him, in 
a manner with which, as he conceived according to 
his habit, the aspects of the place he was then visit- 
ing had something to do. The air there, air which 
it was fancied had the singular property of preserv- 
ing or restoring the whiteness of ivory, was pure 
and thin. An even veil of lawn-like white cloud 
had now drawn over the sky ; and under its broad, 
shadowless lio^ht everv tone and hue of time came 
out upon the old yellow temples and houses, seem- 
ing continuous with the rocks they rose from. Some 
half-conscious motive of poetic grace would appear 
to have determined their grouping ; partly resisting, 
partly going along with the natural wildness and 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 285 

harshness of the place, its floods and precipices. 
An air of immense age possessed, above all, the 
vegetation around — a world of evergreen trees — the 
olives especially (older than how man}^ generations 
of men's lives !) fretted and twisted by the combin- 
ing forces of life and death, into every conceivable 
caprice of form. In the windless weather all seemed 
to be listening to the roar of the immemorial water- 
fall, plunging down so unassociably among these 
human habitations, and with a motion so unchanging 
from age to age as to count, even in this time-worn 
place, as an image of unalterable rest. Yet the clear 
sky all but broke, to let through the ray which was 
silently quickening everything in the late February 
afternoon, and the unseen violet refined itself through 
the air. It was as if the spirit of life in nature were 
but withholding any too precipitate revelation of 
itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work. 

Through some accident to the trappings of his 
horse at the inn where he rested, Marius had an 
unexpected delay. lie sat down in one of those 
olive-gardens, and, all within and^around him turning 
still to reverie, the course of his own life hitherto 
seemed to retire from him into some other world, 
distinct from the point at which he was now placed 
to watch it, like the distant road below, over which 
he had traveled that morning across the Cam- 
pagna. Through a dreamy land he could see himselt 
moving, as if in another life, detached from the 
present, and like another person, throurrh all his 
fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point. 



286 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

weeping or delighted, escaping from various dangers. 
And the vision brought, first of all a forcible impulse 
of nothing else than gratitude, as if he must actually 
look round for some one to share his joy with — to 
whom he might tell of it, as a relief. Companion- 
ship, indeed, familiarity with souls noble and gifted, 
or at least sweet to him, had been, through this and 
that long space of it, the chief delight of the journey : 
and was it only the general sense and residue of that 
familiarity, diffused through his memories, which, in 
a while, suggested the question whether there had 
not been — besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, 
and through the solitude which in spite of ardent 
friendship he had perhaps loved best of all things — 
a companion, a perpetual companion, ever at his side 
throughout ; doubling his pleasure in the roses by 
the way, recipient of his depression or peevishness, 
above all, as of old, of his grateful recognition of the 
fact that he himself was there at all ? Would not all 
have faded away altogether, had he been left for one 
moment really alone in it ? In his deepest apparent 
solitude there had been rich entertainment. It was 
as if there were not one but two wayfarers, side by 
side, visible there across the plain, as he indulged 
his fancy. A bird came and sang among the wattled 
hedge-roses : an animal feeding crept nearer : the 
child who kept it was gazing quietly : and the scene 
and the hour still conspiring, he passed from that 
mere fantasy of a self not himself, beside him in his 
comino: and ^oing, to those divinations of a breath 
of the spirit, at work in all things, of which there had 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 287 

t)een glimpses for him from time to time in his old 
philosophic readings — in Plato, in Aristotle, and 
others — last but not least, in Aurelius. Through one 
reflection upon another, he passed from those instinc- 
tive feelings or divinations, to the thoughts which 
articulate and give them logical consistency, and for- 
mulate at last, out of our experiences of our own 
and the world's life, that reasonable Ideal^ which the 
Old Testament calls the Oreato7\ and the (ireek 
philosophers Eternal Reason^ and the New Testa- 
ment the Father of Men — as one builds up from act 
and word and expression of the friend actually visible 
at one's side, an ideal of the spirit within him. 

In this peculiar and privileged hour, his body, as 
he could recognize, although just then, in the whole 
sum of its capacities, so enXXveXy possessed by him — 
nay ! by some mysterious intimacy, actually his very 
self — was yet determined by a vast system of material 
influences external to it, a thousand combining ele- 
ments from earth and sky, in the currents of the air, 
on that bland afternoon. Its powers of apprehension 
were but susceptibilities to influence. Its perfection 
of capacity might be said to lie in this, that it sur- 
rendered itself impassively, like a leaf on the wind, 
to the motions of the great stream of material 
energies outside itself. Might not the intellectual 
being also, which was still more intimately himself, 
after that analogy of the bodily life, be but a moment, 
an impulse or series of impulses, belonging to an 
intellectual system without him, diffusing itself 
through all time and place — that great stream of 



288 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

spiritual energy, of which his own imperfect thoughts, 
yesterday or to-day, were the remote, and therefore 
imperfect, pulsations. It was the hypothesis (boldest, 
yet in reality most conceivable of all hypotheses) 
which had dawned on the contemplations of the two 
opposed great masters of the old Greek thought, 
alike: — the World of Ideas ^ existent only in and by 
their being known, as Plato conceived ; the creative^ 
incorruptible^ informing Mind, supposed by Aris- 
totle, so sober-minded, yet in this matter left, after 
all, something of a mystic. Might not that whole 
material world, then playing so masterfully upon 
his bodily organization, the very scene around him, 
the immemorial rocks, the carved marble, the rush- 
ing water, be themselves but reflections in, or a 
creation of, that perpetual mind, wherein he too be- 
came conscious, for an hour, a day, or for so many 
years? Upon what other hypothesis could he so 
well understand the persistency of all these things 
for his own intermittent consciousness of them, for 
the intermittent consciousness of so manj^ genera- 
tions, fleeting away one after another ? It was easier 
to conceive of the material fabric of the world around 
him as but an element in a world of thought — as a 
thought in a mind — than of mind as an element, or 
accident, or passing condition, in a material order ; 
because mind was really nearer to himself ; it was an 
explanation of what was less known by what was 
known better. Just then, the merely material 
world, so often like a heavy wall about him, seemed 
the unreal thing, and to be breaking' away all around ; 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 289 

and he felt a quiet hope and joy in the dawning of 
this doctrine upon him as an actually credible 
opinion : it was like the dawning of day over a vast 
prospect with the " new city " in it. That divine 
companion figured no longer as only an occasional 
wayfarer beside him, but as the unfailing " assistant," 
without whose inspiration and concurrence he could 
not breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily senses, 
rounding and supporting his imperfect thoughts. 
How often had the recollection of their transitoriness 
spoiled his most natural pleasures in life, actually 
confusing his sense of them by a suggestion of failure 
and death in everything ! How had he longed, some- 
times, that there were indee^^ one to whose memory 
he could commit his own li. j .: fortunate moments? 
his admiration and love, nay i the very sorrows of 
which he could not bear quite to lose the sense — one, 
strong to retain them even should he forget, in whose 
abler consciousness they might remain present as real 
things still, over and above that mere quickening of 
capacity which was all that remained of them in 
himself! And he had apprehended to-day, in the 
special clearness of one privileged hour, that in which 
the experiences he most valued might as it were take 
refuge — birds of passage as they were for himself, in 
and by himself, soon out of sight or with broken 
wing; yet not really lost, after all, on their way to 
the enduring light, in which the fair hours of life 
would present themselves as living creatures forever 
before the perpetual observer. And again, that sense 
of companionship; of ai^rson beside him, evoked the 



290 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

faculty of conscience— of conscience, as of old when 
he had been at his best — in the form not of fear, nor 
of self-reproach even, but of a certain lively grati- 
tude. 

Himself — his ideas and sensations — never fell again 
precisely into focus as on that day, yet he was the 
richer by its experience. But for once to have come 
into subjection to that peculiar mood, to have felt the 
train of reflections which belong to it really forcible 
and conclusive — to have been led by them to a con- 
clusion — to have apprehended the Great Ideal, so 
palpably that it defined a personal gratitude and the 
sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the 
shadows of the world, made this one particular day 
among all days a space marked in life and forever 
recoo^nizable. It o^ave him a definite and ascertained 
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of what his 
soul really demanded from the powers, whatever they 
might be, which had brought him, as he was, into the 
world at all. And, again, would he be faithful to 
himself, to his own habits and leading suppositions, 
if he did but remain just there ? Must not all the 
rest of his life be a seeking after the equivalent of 
that reasonable Ideal, among so-called actual things 
— a gathering up of every trace and note of it, here 
or there, which actual experience might present to 
him? 



PAET THE FOURTH. 



CHAPTER XX. 

TWO CURIOUS HOUSES. 

I. GUESTS. 

*• Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men 
shall see visions.^* 

A NATURE like that of Marius, composed, in about 
equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly 
accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even 
less susceptible than other men's characters of essen- 
tial change. And yet the experience of that fortu- 
nate hour, seeming to gather into one central act of 
vision all the deeper impressions his mind had ever 
received upon it, did not leave him quite as he had 
been : for his mental view, at least, it changed 
measurably the world about him, of which he was 
still indeed a curious spectator, but which looked 
further off, was weaker in its hold, and, in a sense, 
less real to him, than ever. It was as if he viewed 
it, mentally, through a diminishing glass. And the 
permanency of this change he could note, some years 
later, when it happened that he was a guest at a 
feast, in Avhich the various exciting elements oi 

Roman life, its physical and intellectual accomplish- 

293 



294 MAKIUS TEK EPICUUEAxN. 

ments, its frivolity and far-fetched elegancies, its 
strange, mystic essays after the unseen, were elabo- 
rately combined. The great Apuleius, the poetic 
ideal of his boyhood, had come to Rome — was now- 
visiting Tusculum, at the house of their common 
friend, a certain aristocratic poet who loved every 
sort of superiorities: and it was to a supper-party 
given in his honor that Marius had been invited. 

It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession 
to his own early boyish hero-worship, and with some 
sense of superiority in himself, as he saw his old 
curiosity grown now almost to indifference, with a 
truer measure of its object when it was on the point 
of satisfaction at last, that he mounted to the little 
town on the hillside, the streets of which were broad 
flights of easy steps, gathered round a single great 
house below Cicero's villa on the heights, now in ruins 
and " haunted." There was a touch of weirdness in 
the circumstance that it was in this romantic place 
he had been bidden to meet the writer who had 
come to seem almost like one of the personages in 
his own fiction. Through the tall openings of the 
stair-cased streets, up which, here and there, the 
cattle were going home slowly from the pastures 
below, the Alban heights, between the great walls 
of the ancient houses, seemed close upon him — a 
vaporous screen of dun violet against the setting 
sun — with those waves of surpassing softness in their 
boundary line, characterizing them as volcanic hills. 
The coolness of the little brown market-place, for 
the sake of which even the working people were 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 295 

leaving the plain, in long file through the olive- 
gardens, to pass the night, was grateful, after the 
heats of Rome. Those wild country figures, clad in 
every kind of fantastic patchwork, stained by wind 
and weather fortunately enough for the eye, under 
that significant light, inclined him to poetr3^ And 
it was a very delicate poetry of its kind, which seemed 
to enfold him, as passing into the poet's house he 
turned to glance for a moment towards the height 
above; whereupon, the numerous cascades of the 
precipitous garden of the villa, framed in the door- 
\vay of the hall, fell into a harmless picture, in its 
place among the pictures within, and hardly more 
real than they ; a landscape-piece, in which the power 
of water — plunging into what unseen depths! — done 
to the life, was pleasant, and without its natural 
terrors. 

At the further end of this bland apartment, fra- 
grant wuth the rare woods of the old, inlaid panel- 
ing, the falling of aromatic oil from the read^'-lighted 
lamps, the iris-root clinging to the dresses of the 
guests, as with the odors of the altars of the gods, 
the supper-table was spread, in all the daintiness 
characteristic of the agreeable j^^^t^ maitre^ who en- 
tertained. He was already most carefully dressed ; 
but, like Martial's Stella, perhaps consciously, meant 
to change his attire once and again during the ban- 
quet ; in the last instance, for an ancient vesture 
(object of much rivalry among the young men of 
fashion, at that great sale of the imperial wardrobes), 
a toga, of altogether lost hue and texture, He wore 



296 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

it with the grace becoming the leader of a thrilling 
movement then on foot for the restoration of that 
disused garment, in which, laying aside the custom- 
ary evening dress, all the visitors were requested to 
appear, setting off the dainty sinuosities and well- 
disposed " golden ways " of its folds, with harmoni- 
ously tinted flowers. The opulent sunset, blending 
pleasantly with artificial light, fell past the quiet 
ancestral effigies of old consular dignitaries, across 
the wide floor strewn with sawdust of sandal-wood, 
and lost itself in the heap of cool coronals, lying 
ready for the foreheads of the guests on a sideboard 
of old citron-wood. The crystal cups darkened with 
old wine, the hues of the early autumn fruit — mul- 
berries, pomegranates, and grapes that had long 
been hanging under careful protection upon the 
vines, were almost as much a feast for the eye, as 
the dusky fires of the rare twelve-petal ed roses. A 
favorite animal, white as snow, brought by one of 
the visitors, purred its way gracefully among the 
wine-cups, coaxed onward from place to place by 
those at table, as they reclined easily on their cush- 
ions of German eider-down, spread over the long 
legged, carved couches. 

A highly refined modification of the acroama — a 
musical performance during a meal for the diversion 
of guests — came presently, hovering round the place 
soothingly ; and so unobtrusively, that the company 
could not guess, and did not like to ask, whether or 
not it had been designed by their entertainer ; inclin- 
ing ou the whole to think it some wonderful peasant' 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 297 



o» 



music peculiar to that wild neighborhood, turning 
as it did now and then, to a solitary reed-note, like 
a bird's, while it wandered into the distance. It 
wandered quite away at last, as darkness with a 
bolder lamplight came on, and made way for another 
sort of entertainment. An odd, rapid, phantasmal 
glitter, advancing from the garden by torchlight 
defined itself, as it came nearer, into a dance of 
young men in armor. Arrived at length in a por- 
tico, open to the supper-chamber, they contrived 
that their mechanical march-movement should fall out 
into a kind of highly expressive dramatic action : 
and with the utmost possible emphasis of dumb 
motion, their long swords w^eaving a silvery network 
in the air, they danced the Death of Paris. The 
young Commodus, already an adept in these matters, 
who had condescended to welcome the eminent 
Apuleius at the banquet, had mysteriously dropped 
from his place, to take his share in the performance ; 
and at its conclusion reappeared, still wearing the 
dainty accouterments of Paris, including a breast, 
plate, composed entirely of overlapping tigers' claws, 
skilfully gilt. The youthful prince had lately as. 
sumed the dress of manhood, on the return of the 
emperor, for a brief visit, from the North ; putting 
up his hair, in imitation of Nero, in a golden box 
dedicated to Capitoline Jupiter. His likeness to 
Aurelius, his father, had become, in consequence, 
more striking than ever ; and he had one source of 
genuine interest in the great literary guest of the 
occasion, in that the latter was the fortunate holder 



29S MARIUS T[1E EPICUREAN. 

of the monopoly of exhibiting wild beasts and gladi- 
atorial shows in the province of Carthage, where he 
resided. 

Still, after all complaisance to the perhaps some- 
what crude tastes of the good emperor's son, it was 
felt that with a guest like Apuleius whom they had 
come prepared to entertain as veritable connoisseurs^ 
the conversation should be learned and superior, and 
the host at last deftly led his company round to 
literature, by the way of bindings. Elegant rolls of 
manuscript from his fine library of ancient Greek 
books passed from hand to hand round the table. 
It was a sign for the visitors themselves to draw 
their own choicest literary curiosities from their 
bags, as their contribution to the banquet : and one 
of them, a famous reader, choosing his lucky mo« 
ment, delivered in tenor voice the piece which fol- 
lows, with a preliminary query as to whether it 
could indeed be the composition of Lucian of Samo- 
sata, understood to be the oreat mocker of that dav — 

" What sound was that, Socrates?" asked Chsere- 
phon. " It came from the beach under the cliff 
yonder, and seemed a long way olf — And how 
melodious it was ! Was it a bird, I wonder. \ 
thought all sea-birds were songless." 

"It was a sea-bird," answered Socrates, "a bird 
called the Halcyon, and has a note full of plaining 
and tears. There is an old story people tell of it. 
It was a mortal woman once, daughter of ^olus, 
god of the winds. Ceyx, the son of the morning, 
star, wedded her in her early maidenhood. The 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 299 

son was not less lair than tiie lather; and when 
it came to pass that he died, the crying of the girl 
as she lamented his sweet usage, was — Just, that! 
And some while after, as Heaven willed it, she was 
changed into a bird. Floating now on bird's wings 
over the sea, she seeks her lost Ceyx, there ; since 
she was not able to find him after lon^: wanderino: 
over the land.'- 

" That then is the Halcyon — the kingfisher," said 
Chaerephon. " I never heard a bird like it before. 
It has truly a plaintive note. What kind of a bird 
is it, Socrates ? " 

" 'Not a large bird, though she has received large 
honor from the o-ods, on account of her singular con. 
jugal affection. For whensoever slie makes her nest, 
a law of nature brings round what is called Halcy- 
on's w^eather — days distinguishable among all others 
for their serenity, though they come sometimes amid 
the storms of winter — Days like to-day ! See how 
transparent is the sky above us, and how motionless 
the sea I — like a smooth mirror." 

" True ! A Halcyon day, indeed ! and yesterday 
was the same. But tell me, Socrates, what is one to 
think of those stories which have been told from the 
beginning, of birds changed into mortals and mor- 
tals into birds ? To me nothing seems more incred- 
ible." 

"Dear Chaerephon," said Socrates, " metbinks we 
are but half-blind judges of the impossible and the 
possible. We try the question bv the standard of 
our human faculty, which avails neither for true 



300 MARICS THK EPICUREAN. 

knowledge, nor lor faith, nor vij^ion. Therefore 
many things seem to us impossible which are really 
easy, man}^ things unattainable which are within our 
reach ; partly through inexperience, partly through 
the childishness of our minds. For in truth, everv 
man, even the oldest of us, is like a little child, so 
brief and babyish are the years of our life in com^ 
parison of eternity. Then, how can we, who com- 
prehend not the faculties of gods and the heavenly 
host, tell whether aught of that kind be possible or 
no? — What a tempest you saw three days ago! 
One trembles but to think of the li^'htnin":, the 
thunder-claps, the violence of the wind ! You might 
have thought the whole world was going to ruin. 
And then, after a little, came this wonderful serenity 
of weather, which has continued till to-day. Which 
do you think the greater and more difficult tiling to 
do : — to exchange the disorder of that irresistible 
whirlwind to a claritv like this, and becalm the 
whole world again, or to refashion the form of a 
woman into that of a bird ? We can teach even 
little children to do something of that sort, — to take 
wax or clay, and mold out of the same material 
many kinds of form, one after another, without dif- 
ficulty. And it may be that to the Deity, whose 
power is too vast for comparison with ours, all pro- 
cesses of that kind are manageable and easy. — How 
much wider is the whole heaven than thyself? — 
More than thou canst express. 

** Among ourselves also, how vast the differences 
we observe in men's degrees of power ! To you and 



, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 301 

me, and many another like us, many things are im- 
possible which are quite easy to others. For those 
who are unmusical, to play on the flute ; to read or 
write, for those who have not yet learned ; is no 
easier than to make birds of women, or women of 
birds. From the dumb and lifeless egg Nature 
molds her swarms of winged creatures, aided, as 
some will have it, by a divine and secret art in the 
wide air around us. She takes from the honeycomb 
a little memberless live thing ; she brings it wings 
and feet, brightens and beautifies it with quaint 
variety of color — and Lo ! the bee in her wisdom, 
making honey worthy of the gods. 

" It follows, that w^e mortals, being altogether of 
little account ; able wholly to discern no great mat- 
ter, sometimes not even a little one ; for the most 
part at a loss as to what happens even with ourselves ; 
may hardly speak with security as to what those 
vast powers of the immortal gods may be concerning 
Kingfisher, or Nightingale. Yet the glory of thy 
inytbus, as my fathers bequeathed it to me, O! 
tearful songstress ! — that will I too hand on to my 
children, and tell it often to my wives, Xanthippe 
and Myrto — the story of thy pious love to Ceyx, and 
of thy melodious hymns ; and above all of the honor 
thou hast with the gods ! " 

The reader's well-turned periods seemed to stimu- 
late, almost uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of 
the eminent man of letters then present. The im 
pulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the 
recital "was well over, in the moving lines j^bout his 



302 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

mouth — by no means designed, as detractors were 
wont to say, merely to display the beauty of his 
teeth : and one of his followers, aware of his hu- 
mors, made ready to transcribe what he would say 
the sort of things of which a collection was then 
forming — the Florida or Flowers^ so to call them, he 
w^as apt to let fall by the way : no impromptu ven- 
tures, but rather elaborate, carved ivories of speech, 
drawn, at length, out of the rich treasury of his 
memory, and as with a fine savor of old musk 
about them. Certainly in this case, thought Marius, 
it was worth while to hear a charming writer speak. 
Discussing, quite in our modern way, the peculiar- 
ities of those suburban views, especially the sea- 
views, of which he was a professed lover, he was 
also every inch a priest of ^sculapius, the patron- 
god of Carthage. There was a piquancy in his roco- 
co^ very African, and as it were perfumed personal- 
ity, though he was now well-nigh sixty years old — a 
mixture of that sort of Platonic spiritualism which 
could speak of the soul of man as but a sojourner in 
the prison of the body really foreign to it, with such 
a relish for merely bodily graces as availed to set the 
fashion in matters of dress, deportment, accent, and 
the like, nay ! with something also which reminded 
Marius of the vein of coarseness he had found in the 
" Golden Book." All this made the total impression 
he conveyed a very uncommon one. Marius did not 
wonder, as he watched him speaking, that people 
freely attributed to him many of the marvelous 
adventures which he had recounted in that famous 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 308 

romance over and above the wildest version of Ids 
own actual history— his extraordinary marriage, his 
religious initiations, his acts of mad generosity, and 
his trial as a sorcerer. 

But a sign came from the imperial prince that it 
was time for the company to separate. He was en- 
tertaining his immediate neighbors at the table with 
a trick from tlie streets ; tossing his olives in rapid 
succession into the air, and catching them as they 
fell, between his lips. His dexterity in this caused 
the mirth around him to become noisy, disturbing 
the sleep of the furry visitor : the learned party broke 
up; and Marius withdrew, glad to escape into the 
open air. The courtesans with their large wigs of 
false blond hair, were lurking for the guests, with 
groups of curious idlers. A great conflagration was 
visible in the distance. Was it in Rome itself, or in 
one of the villages of the country ? Pausing on the 
terrace for a few minutes to watch it, Marius Avas 
for the first time able to converse intimately with 
Apuleius ; and in this moment of confidence the 
^' illuminist," himself with hair so carefullv arrano:ed, 
and who had seemed so full of affectations, almost 
like one of those light women there, as it were, 
dropped a veil, and appeared, while still permitting 
the play of a certain element of theatrical interest in 
his hizarre tenets, to be ready to explain and defend 
his position reasonably. For a moment his fantastic 
foppishness, and his pretensions to idealism and 
rision, seemed to fall into an intelligible congruity 
with each other. In truth, it was the Platonic 



304 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

idealism^ as he conceived it, which animated, and 
^ave him so lively an interest in, the world of the 
purely outward aspects of men and things. — Did 
material things, such things as they had had around 
them all that evening, really need apology for being 
there, to interest one, at all? Were not all visible 
objects — the whole material world, according to the 
consistent testimony of philosophy, in many forms 
— full of souls ; embarrassed perhaps, partly im- 
prisoned, but still eloquent souls. Certainly, the 
philosophy of Plato, with its figurative imagery 
and apologue, its manifold aesthetic coloring, its 
measured eloquence, its music for the outward ear, 
had been, like Plato's old master himself, a two-sided 
or two-colored thing. — Apuleius was a Platonist : 
only, for him, the Ideas of Plato w^ere no creatures 
of logical abstraction, but really informing souls, in 
every type and variety of sensible things. Those 
noises in the house all supper-time, sounding through 
the tables and along the walls — were they only start- 
ings in the old rafters, at the sound of the music and 
laughter ; or rather importunities of the secondary 
selves, the true unseen selves, of all the things and 
persons around ; essaying to break through their 
mere, frivolous, transitory surfaces, and reminding 
one of abiding essentials beyond them, which might 
have their say, their judgment to give, by and by, 
when the shifting of the meats and drinks at life's 
table should be over ? Was not this the true sig- 
nificance of the Platonic doctrine — a hierarchy of 
divine beings, associating themselves with particular 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 305 

things and places, for the purpose of meditating be- 
tween God and man, who only needs due attention 
to be aware of his celestial company, filling the air 
about him as thick as motes in the sunbeam, for the 
ray of sympathetic intelligence shot through it ? 

" Two kinds there are, of animated beings," he ex- 
claimed — " Gods, entirely differing from men in the 
infinite distance of their abode (one part of them 
only is seen by our blunted vision — those mysterious 
stars !) in the eternity of their existence, in the per- 
fection of their nature, contaminated by no contact 
with us : and men, dwelling on the earth, with frivo- 
lous and anxious minds, with infirm and mortal 
members, with variable fortunes ; laboring in vain ; 
taken altogether in their whole species, perhaps, 
eternal ; but, severally, quitting the scene in irresist- 
ible succession. 

" What then ? Has n^t'jre connected itself to- 
o'ether bv no bond, but aLowed itself to be thus 
crippled, and split into the divine and human ele- 
ments? — And you will si ^^ to me; If so it is, that 
man is so entirely exiled from the immortal gods 
that all communication whatever is denied him, 
and not one of them occasionally visits us, as a shep- 
herd visits his sheep — to whom shall I address my 
prayers? Whom shall I invoke as the helper of the 
unfortunate, the protector of the good t 

"There are certain divine powers of a middle 

nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed 

to the gods, and theirs to us. Passing between the 

inhabitants of the earth and those of Heaven, they 
20 



306 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

carry from one to the other prayers and bounties, 
supplication and assistance, being a kind of inter- 
preters. This interval of the air is full of them ! 
Through them, all revelations, miracles, magical 
processes, are effected. For, specially appointed in- 
dividuals of this number have their special provinces, 
administered according to the disposition of each. 
They wander without fixed habitation ; or dwell in 
men's houses — " 

Just then a companion's hand, laid on the shoulder 
of the speaker in the darkness, carried him away, and 
the discourse broke off suddenlv. But its sino:ular 

•/ CD 

utterances were suflBcient to cast back on all the cir- 
cumstances of this strange evening — the dance, the 
readings, the distant fire — a kind of allegoric ex- 
pression ; and made the whole occasion seem like 
nothing so much as one of those same famous Pla- 
tonic figures or apologues. When Marius recalled it, 
he seemed always to hear again the voice of genuine 
conviction, from amidst that scene of at best elegant 
frovolity, pleading for so boldly mystical a view of 
things. For a moment, but only for a moment, as he 
listened, the trees seemed, as of old, to be growing 
"close against the sky." Yes! the reception of 
theory, of hypothesis, did depend a great deal on 
temperament; was the equivalent of temperament. 
That celestial ladder, or hierarchy, was what ex- 
perience suggested to Apuleius: it was what, in 
slightly different forms, certain persons in every age 
had tended to believe ; they were glad to hear it 
asserted, on the authority of a grave philosophy : 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 307 

although he, Marius, certainl\% would never feel that 
force of kindly warmth in the very contact of the 
air about him. Yearning, as much as they, for 
audible or visible companionship, in that hard world 
of Rome — for some wing, not visionary, across its 
unpeopled sky — he must still object, that they as- 
sumed all that with too much facility. His second 
thought upon it was that the presentation, even 
for a few moments of such fantastic vision, left 
the actual world more lonely. The little godship 
for whom the countryman (unconscious Platonist) 
trimmed his twinkling lamp, would never slip, for 
him, out of the bark of these immemorial olive-trees 
— no! not even in the wildest moonlight. And for 
himself, he must still hold by what his eyes really 
saw. Onlv, he had to concede also, that this bold- 
ness of Platonic theory was the witness, at least, to 
a variety of human disposition, and a consequent 
variety of mental view, which might — who could 
tell ? — be correspondent to, be defined by and define, 
varieties of facts, of truths just " behind the veil," 
regarding the world they all alike had before them 
for their given premiss ; a world, wider, perhaps, 
in its possibilities, than all possible fancies about it. 



CHAPTEK XXL 

TWO CURIOUS HOUSES. 
II. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA's HOUSE. 

** Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men 
shall see visions.''^ 

Cornelius had certain friends in or near Rome^ 
whose household, to Marius, as he pondered now and 
then what might be the determining influences of 
that peculiar 3haracter, presented itself as possibly 
its main secre: — the hidden source from which he 
might derive the beauty and strens;th of a nature, so 
persistently fresh in the midst of a jomewhat jaded 
world. But Marius had never yet seen those friends ; 
and it was almost bv accident that the veil of reserve 
was at last lifted, and, with strange contrast to his 
visit to the poet's villa at Tusculum, he entered an- 
other curious house. 

" The house in which she lives," says that mystical 

German writer quoted once before, " is for the 

orderly soul, which does not liv^e on blindly before 

her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences, 

building and adorning the parts of a many-roonied 

abode for herself, only an expansion of the body ; as 
308 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 309 

the body, according to the philosophy of Swedenborg, 
is but an expansion of the soul. For such an orderly 
soul, as she lives onward, all sorts of delicate affin- 
ities establish themselves, between her and the doors 
and passage-ways, the lights and shadows, of her out- 
ward abode, until she seems incoi'porate into it — till 
at last, in the entire expressiveness of what is out- 
ward, there is for her, to speak properly, no longer 
any distinction between outward and inward, at all; 
and the light w^hich creeps at a particular hour on a 
particular picture or space upon the wall, the scent 
of flowers in the air at a particular window, become 
to her, not so much apprehended objects, as them- 
selves powers of apprehension, and doorways to 
things beyond — seeds or rudiments of new^ faculties, 
by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a matter 
lying beyond her actually attained capacity of sense 
and spirit.'' 

So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we 
may think, together with that bodily "tent" or 
" tabernacle," but one of the many vestures of the 
pilgrim soul, to be left by her, worn out one by one, 
as if on the wayside ; as it was from her, indeed, 
that they borrowed all the temporary value and sig- 
nificancy they had. 

The two friends were returning to Rome from a 
visit to a country-house, where again a mixed com- 
pany of guests had been assembled — Marius, for his 
part, a little weary of gossip, and those sparks of ill- 
tempered rivalry, which seem sometimes to be the 
only sort of lire that the intercourse of men in 



310 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

general society can strike out of thein. Mere reaction 
against all this, as thev started in the clear morninsr 
made their companionship, for one of them at least, 
not less tranquilizing than that solitude he so much 
valued. Something- in the southwest wind combin- 
ing with their own intention, favored increasingly, 
as the hours wore on, a serenity like that Marius 
had felt once before in journeying over the great 
plain towards Tibur — a serenity which was to-day 
brotherly amity also, and w^hich seemed to draw into 
its owned charmed circle all that was then present 
to eye or ear, while they talked or were silent to- 
gether, and all petty irritations, and the like, shrank 
out of existence, or were certainly beyond its limits. 
The natural fatigue of the long journey overcame 
them quite suddenly at last, while they were still 
about two miles distant from Rome. The endless 
line of tombs and cypress-trees had been visible for 
hours against the sky towards the West ; and it was 
just where a cross-road from the Latin Way fell into 
the Appian, that Coi'nelius halted at a doorway in a 
long, low wall — the boundary-w^all of the court of a 
villa, it might seem — as if at liberty to enter, and 
rest there awhile. He held the open door for his 
companion to enter also, if he would ; with an ex- 
pression, as he lifted the latch, which seemed to ask 
Marius, apparently shrinking from a possible in- 
trusion — " Would you like to see it ? " — Was he will- 
ing to look upon that, the seeing of which might de- 
fine — yes ! define the critical turning-point in his 
days? 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 311 

The Jittle doorwny in this long, low wall, so old 
that it seemed almost a part of the rocky soil on 
which it was built, admitted them, in fact, into the 
outer courtyard or garden of a villa, disposed in one 
of those abrupt natural hollows, which give its char- 
acter to the country in this place ; so that the house 
itself, and all its dependent buildings, the spacious- 
ness of which surprised Marius as he entered, were 
wholly concealed from passengers along the road. 
All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were 
quiet signs of wealth and a noble taste — a taste, in- 
deed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxta- 
position of the material it had to deal with, consisting 
almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here 
arranged and harmonized, with effects both as re- 
gards color and form, so delicate, as to seem really 
derivative from a spirit fairer than any which lay 
within the resources of the ancient world. It was 
the old way of true Renaissance — the way of nature 
with her roses, the divine way with the body of man, 
and it may be with his very soul — conceiving the 
new organism, by no sudden and abrupt creation, but 
rather by the action of a new ])rinciple upon elements 
all of which had indeed lived and died many times. 
The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the 
spiral columns, the precious corner-stones of imme- 
morial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, 
a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave 
thought and intellectual purpose, in itself, aestheti- 
cally, very seductive. Lastly, herb and tree had 
taken possession of it all, spr«^acUng their seed-bells 



312 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

and light branches, just alive in the trembling air, 
above the ancient garden- walls, against the wide 
spaces of sunset. And from the first they could 
hear singing — the singing partly of children, it would 
seem, and of a new sort; so novel indeed in its ef- 
fect, that it carried the memory of Marius back to 
those old efforts of Fhivian to conceive a new poesy. 
It was the expression not altogether of mirth, yet of 
a wonderful happiness — the blithe expansion of a 
joyful soul, in people upon whom some all-subduing 
experience had wrought heroicall}^ and who still re- 
membered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a 
great deliverance. 

His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the 
sympathies, of places — above all to any hieratic or 
religious expression they might have — was at its 
liveliest, as Marius, still possessed by that peculiar 
singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave dis- 
cretion all around him, entered the house itself. 
That intelligent seriousness about life, the lack of 
which had always seemed to him to make those who 
were without it of some strange, different species 
from himself, summing up all the lessons of his ex 
perience, from those old days at White-nights, was 
concentrated here, as if in designed congruity with 
his favorite precepts of the power of physical vision, 
into an actual picture. If the true value of souls is 
in proportion to what they can admire, Marius was 
just then an acceptable soul. As he passed through 
the various chambers, great and small, one dominant 
thought increased upon him — the thought of chaste 



MARTUS THE EPICUREAN. 31^ 

women and their children ; of the various affections 
of the family life amid its most natural conditions, 
but developed, in devout imitation of some sublime 
new type of it, into great controlling- passions. 
There reigned throughout, an order and purity, an 
orderly disposition, as if by way of making ready 
for some gracious spousals. The place itself was 
like a bride adorned for lier husband : and its sin- 
gular cheerfulness, the abundant light everywhere, 
the sense of peaceful industry, of wliich he received 
a deep impression witliout precisely reckoning where- 
in it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible 
contrast just at first to the place to which he was 
next conducted by Cornelius : still with a sort of 
eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he 
forbore an explanation which might well be looked 
tor by his companion. 

An old flower garden in the rear of the house, set 
here and there with a venerable olive-tree — a picture 
in pensive shade and fiery blossom, as transparent, in 
that afternoon light, as the old miniature-painters' 
work on the walls of the chambers above — was 
bounded, towards the west, by a low, giassy hill. A 
narrow opening cut in its steep side, like a solid 
blackness there, admitted Marius and his gleaming 
companion into a hollow cavern or crypt, which was 
indeed but the family burial-place of the Cecilii (to 
whom this residence belonged) brought thus, after 
an arrangement then becomino^not unusual, into im- 
mediate connection with the abode of the living; in 
a bold assertion of the unity of family life, which the 



314 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

sanction of tlie Holy Family would, tiereafter, more 
and more reinforce. Here was, in fact, the center of 
the peculiar religious expressiveness, the sanctity, of 
the whole place. " Every person makes the place 
that belongs to him a religious place at his own 
election, by the carrying of his dead into it''"' — had 
been a persuasion of old Koiuan law, which it was 
reserved for the early Christian societies, like that 
which the piety of a wealthy Roman matron had 
here established, to realize in all its consequences. 
Yet certainly it was unlike any cemetery Marius had 
ever yet seen : most obviously in this, that these 
people had returned to the older fashion of disposing 
of their dead by burial instead of burning. A family 
sepulcher in the first instance, it was growing into a 
vast necropolis^ a whole township of the dead, by 
means of some free expansion of the family interest 
beyond its amplest natural limits. The air of vener- 
able beauty which characterized the house and its 
precincts above, was maintained here also. It was 
certainly with a great outlay of labor that ti/ese 
long, seemingly endless, yet carefully designed gal- 
leries, were so rapidly increasing, with their orderly 
layers of beds or berths, one above another, cut on 
both sides of the pathway, in the porous black tufa^ 
through which all the moisture filters downwards, 
leaving the parts above dry and wholesome. All 
alike were carefully closed, and with all the delicate 
costliness at command ; some with simple tiles of 
baked clay, many with slabs of marble, enriched 
by fair inscriptions — marble, in some cases, tAken 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 315 

from an older pagan tomb— tlie inscription some, 
times a paUmpsest, the new epitaph being woven 
into the fading letters of an earlier one. 

As in a pagan cemetery, an abundance of utensils 
for the worship and commemoration of the dead was 
disposed around — incense, vessels of floating oil- 
lights, above all, garlands and flowers, relieved into 
all the stronger iieriness by the coal-like blackness 
of the soil itself in this place, a volcanic sandstone, 
the cinder of burn-out fires. (Would they ever 
kindle, take possession of, and transform the place 
ao-ain?) Turning into an ashy paleness where, at 
regular intervals, a Imninare, or air-hole, let in a 
hard beam of clear but sunless light from above, 
with their heavy sleepers, row upon row, leaving a 
passage so narrow that oiily a single person could 
move along it at a time, cheek to cheek with them, 
the high walls seemed to shut one in, into the great 
company of the dead. Only just the long straight 
pathway remained before him; opening, however, 
here and there, into a small chamber, around a broad, 
table-like coffin, or "altar" tomb (one or more), 
adorned more profusely than the others, sometimes 
as if in observance of an anniversary. Clearly, these 
people, concurring here with the special sympathies 
of Marius himself, had adopted this practice of burial 
from some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained 
concerning the body; a feeling which, in no irrev- 
erent curiosity, he would fain have understood. The 
complete, irreparable disappearance of the dead on 
the funeral pyre, so crushing to the spirits, as he haU 



31G MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

found it, iiad long since given him a preference for 
this mode of settlement to the last sleep, as having 
something more homelike and hopeful about it, at 
Jeast in outward seemint]:. But whence the strangle 
confidence that these "handfuls of white dust" 
would hereafter recompose themselves once more 
into exulting human creatures ? By what heavenly 
alchemy, what reviving dew from above, which was 
certainly never ao^ain to reach the dead violets ? — 
Januarius^ Agaietus, Felicitas — Martyrs ! refresh^ 
1 ^ray you, the soul of Cecil, of Cornelius ! said an 
inscription (one of many such) scratched, like a pass- 
ing sigh, when the mortar was still fresh which had 
closed-in the prison-door. All criticism of this bold 
hope, apparently as sincere as it was audacious in its 
claim, being set aside, here, at least, carried further 
than ever before, was that pious, systematic com- 
memoration of the dead, which in its chivalrous 
refusal to forget and wholly leave the helpless, had 
always seemed toMarius the central type or symbol 
of all natural duty. 

The stern soul of Jonathan Edwards, applying the 
faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we 
know, the vision of infants not a span long, on the 
floor of hell. All visitors to the Catacombs must 
have noticed, in a very different theological con- 
nection, the numerous children's graves — beds of in- 
fants, but a span long indeed — little, lowly prisoners 
of hope, on these sacred floors. It w^as with great 
curiosity, certainly, that Marius observed them ; in 
some instances adorned with the favorite toys of 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 317 

their tiny occupants — toy-soldiers, little chariot- 
wheels, all the paraphernalia of a baby-house ; and 
when he saw afterwards the living ones, who sang 
and were bus\% above — sang their psalms Laudate 
Pueri Doniinum ! — their very faces caught for hira 
a sort of quaint unreality, from the memory of those 
others, the children of the Catacombs, but a little 
way below. 

Hie congesta jacet quaeris si tuiba piorum : 
Corpora sanctorum retinent veneranda sepulcra ! — 

Here and there, mingling with the record of 
merely natural decease, and sometimes even at these 
children's graves, were the signs of violent death or 
martyrdom — the proof that some '•' had loved not 
their lives unto the death " — in the little red phial 
of blood, the palm-branch, the red flowers for their 
heavenly *' birthday." It was in one sepulcher, in 
particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly 
adorned for what, by a bold paradox, was thus 
treated as, nataUtia — a birthday, that the arrange- 
ments of the whole place visibly centered. And it 
was with a curious noveltv of feelino:, of the dawn- 
ing of a fresh order of experiences upon him, that, 
standing beside those mournful relics, snatched in 
haste from the common place of execution not many 
years before, Marius became, as by some gleam of 
foresight, aware of the whole possible force of evi- 
dence for a strange, new hope, defining a new and 
weighty motive of action in the world, in those tragic 
deaths for the " Christian superstition ; " of wjiicb 



318 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

he had heard something indeed ) but which had 
seemed to him hitherto but one savagery, one self- 
provoked savagery, the more, in a cruel and stupid 
world. 

And that poignant memory of suffering seemed to 
draw him on towards a still more vivid and pathetic 
image of suffering, in a distant but not dim back- 
ground. Yes ! the interest, the expression of the 
entire place was filled with that, like the savor of 
some precious incense. Penetrating the whole at- 
mosphere, touching everything around with its 
peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all this visible 
mortality, death itself, more beautiful than any fan- 
tastic dream of old mythology had ever hoped to 
make it ; and that, in a simple sincerity of feeling 
about a supposed actual fact. The thought, the 
word. Pax — Pax Tecum! — was put forth every- 
where, with images of hope, snatched sometimes 
even from that jaded pagan world, which had really 
afforded men so little of it from first to last, — the con- 
soling images it had thrown off, of succor, of regenera- 
tion, of escape from death, — Hercules wrestling with 
Death for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the 
wild beasts, the Shepherd with his sheep, the Shep- 
herd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulders. 
Only, after all, these imageries formed but the 
r;lightest contribution to the whole dominant effect of 
tranquil hope there — of a kind of heroic cheerfulness 
and grateful expansion of heart ; again, as with the 
sense of some real deliverance, and which seemed 
actually to deepen, the longer one lingered through 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 319 

these strange and fearful passages. A figure, partly 
pagan, yet the most frequently repeated of all those 
visible parables — the figure of one just escaped, as 
if from the sea, still in strengthless, surprised joy, 
clinging to the v^ery verge of the shore — together 
with the inscription beneath it, seemed best to ex- 
press the sentiment of the whole. And it was just 
as he had puzzled out this inscription — 

I went doivn to the bottom of the mountains ; 
The earth with her bars iras about me for ever ; 
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption 

• — that, hardly^ with a sense of surprise or change, 
Marius found himself emerging again, like a later 
mystic traveler through similar dark places " quieted 
by hope," into the daylight. 

They were still within the precincts of the house, 
still in possession of that wonderful singing, though 
almost in the o{)en country, with a great view of the 
Campag7ia before them, and the hills beyond. The 
orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, 
was alread}^ gray in the dew\^ twilight, though 
the western sky, in which the greater stars were 
visible, was still afloat with ruddy splendor, seem- 
ing to repress by contrast the coloring of all earthly 
things, yet with the sense of a great richness linger- 
ing in their shadows. Just then the voices of the 
singers, a " voice of joy health," concentrated them- 
selves, with a solemn antistrophic movement, into 
an evening, or " candle " hy^mn — the hymn of the kin- 
dling of the lamp. It was like the evening itself, its 



320 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

bope and fears, and the stars shining in the midst ol 
it, made audible. Half above, half below the level 
mist, which seemed to divide light from darkness 
(the great wild flowers of the meadow just distin- 
guishable around her skirts, as she moved across the 
grass) came now the mistress of the place, the wealthy 
Roman matron, left early a widow by the confessor 
Cecilius a few years before. Arrayed in long robes 
with heavy, antique folds, and a veil or coif folded 
under the chin, "gray within gray,*' she seemed to 
Marius to have, in her temperate beauty, something 
of the male and serious character of the best Greek 
female statuary .^ Yery foreign, however, to any 
Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care, 
with which she carried the child in her arms, warm 
within the folds of her mantle. Another little child, 
a year or two older, walked beside her, with the 
fingers of one hand bent upon her girdle. They 
stayed for a mon^ent to give an evening greeting to 
Cornelius, as they passed. 

And that visionary scene was the fitting close of 
the afternoon's strange experiences. A few minutes 
afterwards, as he was passing again upon the public 
road, it might have seemed a dream. The house of 
Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house 
he had lately visited at Tusculum. Yet what a con- 
trast did the former present, in its suggestions of 
hopeful industry, of immaculate cleanness, of respon- 
sive affection ! — all determined by the transporting 

1 " 0,when mine eyes did see Olivia first, 

Methought she purged the air of pestilence ! " 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 321 

discovery of a fact, or series of facts, in which the 
old puzzle of life had found its key. In truth, one of 
his most constant and characteristic traits had ever 
been the longing for escape — for sudden, relieving 
interchange, even upon the spaces of life, along which 
he had lingered most pleasantly — for a lifting, from 
time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like the 
necessity the painter is under, to put an open window 
or doorway in the background of his picture, which, 
without that, would be heavy and inanimate ; or like 
the sick man's longing for northern coolness, and 
whispering willow-trees, amid the breathless and 
motionless evergreen forests of the south. Just in 
this \vay had that visit happened to him, through so 
slight an accident. Rome and Roman life, just then, 
had come to seem to him like a close wood of beau- 
tiful bronze-work, transformed, by some malign en- 
chantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet 
with its roots in a deep, downtrodden soil of poignant 
human susceptibilities. In the midst of its suffoca- 
tion, that old longing for escape had been satisfied by 
this vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never 
before. It was still, indeed, according to the un- 
changeable law of his character, to the eye, to the 
visual faculty of mind, that those experiences ap- 
pealed — the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose 
very faces seemed to sing, the virginal beauty of the 
mother and her children. Only, in his case, all that 
constituted a very real, and controlling or exigent 
matter, added to life, with which, according to his 
old maxim, he must make terms. 

2T 



322 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

The thirst for every kind of "experience," prompted 
by a philosophy which said that nothing was intrin- 
sically great or small, had ever been at strife in him 
with a hieratic refinement, in which the boy-priest 
survived ; prompting the selection, the choice, of 
what was perfect of its kind ; and a subsequent chiv- 
alrous adherence of mind to that. That had led him 
alono^alwavsin communion with ideals, at least half- 
realized in his own conditions of being, or in the 
actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius. 
Surelv in this strano^e new societv he had known for 
the first time to-dav — in this holv familv, like a fenced 

ft ft/ ft/ / 

garden — was the fulfilment of all the judgments 
and preferences of that half-known friend, which of 
late years had been so often his protection in the 
perplexities of his life. Here was, it might be, if 
not the cure, yet the solace and anodyne of his great 
sorrows ; of that constitutional sorrowfulness, which 
might be by no means peculiar to himself, but which 
had made his life, at all events, indeed like a long 
"disease of the spirit." The very air of this place 
seemed to come out to meet him, as if full of mercy 
in its mere contact; like a soothing touch to an 
aching limb. And yet, on the other band, he was 
aware that it might awaken responsibilities — new, 
untried responsibilities— and demand something from 
him, in return. Might this new vision, like the ma- 
lignant beauty of that old pagan Medusa, be ex- 
clusive of all admiring gaze on anything save itself? 
At least he suspected that after it he could never 
again be altogether a$ he had been before. 



CHAPTEE XXII. 

THE MINOR "peace OF THE CHURCH." 

Faithful to the spirit of his early Epicurean 
philosophy and the impulse to surrender himself; in 
perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to anything that, 
as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him 
strongly, Marius informed himself with much pains 
concerning the church in Cecilia's house; incliningat 
first to explain the peculiarities of that place by the 
establishment there of the schola or common hall of 
one of those burial-guilds, which at that timecovered 
so much of the unoificial, and, as it might be called, 
subterranean, enterprise of Roman society. 

And what he found, thus looking as it were for 
the dead among the living, was the vision of a 
natural, a scrupulously natural, love ; ti*ansforming, 
by some new finesse of insight into the truth of 
human relationships, and under the urgency of some 
new motive by him so far unfathomable, all the con- 
ditions of life. He saw, in all its primitive freshness 
and amid the lively facts of its actual coming into 
the world, as a reality of experience, that regenerate 
type of humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and 
his successors, down to the best and purest davs of 

323 ■ 



324 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

the young Raffaelle, working under conditions very 
friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an 
artistic ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring of 
some wonderful new hope within himself, the genius, 
the unique power of Christianity ; in exercise then, as 
it has been exercised ever since, in spite of many 
hindrances and under the most inopportune circum- 
stances. Chastity — he seemed to understand — the 
chastity of men and women, with all the conditions 
and results proper to that chastit}^, is the most 
beautiful thing in the world, and the truest conser- 
vation of the creative energy by which men and 
women were first brought into it. The nature of 
the family, for which the better genius of old Rome 
itself had so sincerely cared, of the family and its 
appropriate affections — all that love of one's kindred 
by which obviously one does triumph in some de- 
ofree over death — had never been so felt before. 
Here, surely ! in its nest-like peace and warmth, its 
jealous exclusion of all that was against itself and 
its own immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set 
around the sacred thing on every side, this re-insti- 
tution of the family did but carry forward, and give 
effect to, the purposes, the kindness of nature itself, 
friendly to man, at all those points, more espe- 
cially, where it involved (by way of due recognition 
of some unfathomed divine condescension, in a cer- 
tain fact or series of facts) pity, and a willing sacri- 
flee of oneself for the weak, for children and the 
Aged, for the dead even. And then, for its constant 
outward token, its significant manner or index, 



MAR1U8 THE EPICUREAN. 325 

it issued in a debonair grace, and some mystic at- 
tractiveness — a courtesy, which made Marius doubt 
whether, after all, that famed Greek gayety or 
blitheness in the handling of life, had been so 
great a success. In contrast with the incurable 
insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the 
higher lloman life, and still truest to the old primi- 
tive soul of goodness amid its evil, this new creation 
he saw (a fair picture, beyond the skill of any master 
of old pagan beauty) had indeed the appropriate 
freshness of " the bride adorned for her husband." 
And still its grace was no mere simplicity. Things, 
new and old, seemed to be coming as if out of some 
goodly treasure-house, the brain full of science, and 
the heart rich with various sentiment, possessing 
withal this surprising healthfulness, this reality of 
heart. 

" You would hardly believe," writes Pliny to his 
wife, " what a longing for you possesses me. Habit 
— that Ave have not been used to be apart — adds 
herein to the primar\^ force of affection. It is that 
keeps me awake at night fancying I see you beside 
me. That is why my feet take me unconsciously to 
your sitting-room, at those hours when I was wont 
to visit you there. That is Avhy I turn from the 
door of the empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like 
an excluded lover." — 

There is a real idyll from that family life, the con- 
servation of which had been the motive of so lai'ge 
a part of the religion of the Romans, still surviving 
among them ; as it survived also in the disposition 



326 MAPwIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

and aims of Aurelius, and, in spite of slanderous 
tongues, in the actual sweetness of his interior life. 
What Marius had been permitted to see was a 
realization of such life higher still : and with — 
Yes ! — with a more effective sanction or consecration 
than had ever been known before, in that fact, or 
series of facts, to be ascertained by those who would. 
The chief glory of the reign of the Antonines had 
been, indeed, that society had attained in it, very im- 
perfectly, and for the most part by cumbrous effort 
of law, many of those ends which Christianity had 
reached with all the sufficiency of a direct and ap 
propriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touch- 
ing charity -sermons on occasions of great ptiblic dis- 
tress ; its charity -children in long file, ill i^e^nbry of 
the elder empress Faustina ; its predecessdrj lirtder pa- 
tronage of ^sculapius, to the modern hospital for the 
sick on the island of Saint Bartholomew in the Tiber. 
But what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it 
were with the painful calculation of old age, the 
church was doing, almost without thinking about it, 
in the plenary masterfulness of youth, because it was 
her very being thus to do. " You don't understand 
your own efforts," she seems to say, to pagan virtue. 
She possessed herself of those efforts, and advanced 
them with an unparalleled liberality and largeness. 
The gentle Seneca would have reverent burial pro- 
vided even for the dead corpse of a criminal. Yet 
when a certain woman gathered for interment the 
insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world surmised 
r hat she must be a Christian : only a Christian would 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 327 

have been likely to conceive so chivalrous a devotion 
towards wretchedness. " We refuse to be witnesses 
even of a homicide commanded by the laws,'^ pleads 
a Christian apologist, " we take no part in your cruel 
sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheater, and 
we hold that to witness a murder is the same thing 
as to commit one." And there was another duty 
almost forgotten, the conscience of which Kousseau 
stirred up in a later degenerate age. In an impas- 
sioned discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels 
mothers to suckle their own infants ; and there are 
Roman epitaphs inscribed by children to their 
mothers which gratefully record this proof of nat- 
ural affection, as a thing then unusual. And in 
this matter again, what a sanction, what a pro- 
vocative to natural duty, lay in that image of the 
new Madonna^ just then rising upon the world like 
the dawn ! 

Christianity had, indeed, revealed itself as the 
great source and motive of chastity. And this 
chastit}^ reaffirmed in all its conditions, fortilied that 
rehabilitation of peaceful labor, after the mind, the 
pattern, of the workman of Galilee, which was 
another direct instinct of the catholic church, as in- 
deed the long-desired initiator of a real religion of 
cheerfulness, and a true lover of the industry (so to 
term it), the labor, the creation, of God. 

And that hi<;h-toned vet srenial reassertion of the 
ideal of woman, of the family, of industry, of man's 
work in life, so close to the truth of nature, was also, 
in that charmed moment of the minor '* Peace of the 



328 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

church," realizing itself as an influence tending to 
beauty, to the adornment of life and the world. 
The sword in the world, the right eye plucked out, 
the right hand cut off, the spirit of reproach which 
those images express, and of which monasticism is 
the fulfilment, reflect one side only of the nature 
of the divine missionary of the New Testament. 
Opposed to, yet blent with, this ascetic or militant 
character, is the image of the Good Shepherd — 
favorite sacred image of the primitive church — 
serene, blithe, and debonair, beyond the gentlest 
shepherd of Greek mythology ; the daih^ food of 
whose spirit is the beatific vision of the kingdom of 
peace among men. And this latter side of the divine 
character of Christ, rightly understood, is the final 
achievement of that vein of bold and brilliant hope- 
fulness in man, which has sustained him so far 
through his immense labor, his immense sorrows; 
and of which that peculiarly Greek gayety^ in the 
handling of life, is but one manifestation. Some- 
times one, sometimes the other, of those two con- 
trasted aspects of the character of Christ, have, in 
different ages and under the urgency of different 
human needs, been at work also in his " mystical 
body." Certainly, in that brief " Peace of the 
church " under the Antonines, the spirit of a pas- 
toral security and happiness seems to have been 
largely expanding itself. There, in the early Koman 
church, was to be seen, and on a basis of reasonable 
grounds, that long-sought serenity of satisfaction, on 
a dispassionate survey of the facts of life, contrast- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. ^329 

ing itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, 
with the imperial philosopher's so heavy burden of 
unrelieved melancholy. It was Christianity in its 
humanity, or even in its humanism, in its generous 
hopefulness for man, its common sense, and alacrity 
of cheerful service, its sympathy with all creatures, 
its appreciation of beauty and daylight, 

" The angel of righteousness," says the Shepherd 
of Hermas, the most characteristic religious book of 
that age, its Pilgrim's Progress — "the angel of 
righteousness is delicate and modest, and meek and 
quiet : Take from thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will 
one day know !) it is the sister of doubt and ill-tem- 
per: Grief is more evil than all the spirits, and is 
most dreadful to the servants of God, and be3^ond 
all spirits destroyeth man : For, as when good news 
has come to any one in grief, straightway he for- 
getteth his former grief, and no longer attendeth to 
anything except the good news which he hath heard, 
so do ye, also ! having received a renewal of 3^our 
spirit through the beholding of these good things : 
Put on therefore gladness that hath always favor 
before God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight 
thyself in it ; for every man that is glad doeth the 
things that are good, and thinketh good thoughts, 
despising grief." — Such were the popular utterances 
of this 'new people, among whom so much of what 
Marius had valued most in the world seemed to be 
under renewal ; heightened and harmonized by some 
transforming spirit, a spirit which, in its dealing 
with the elements of the old world, was guided by a 



330 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

wonderful tact of selection, exclusion, juxtaposition ; 
begetting thereby a unique expression of freshness, 
of animation and a grave beauty, because the whole 
outward world of sense was understood to be but 
a showing-forth of tlie unction and royalty of an 
inward priesthood and kingship in the soul, among 
the prerogatives of which was a delightful sense of 
freedom. 

The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who, 
Epicurean as he was, had his visionary aptitudes, by 
an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which 
he was of course familiar, must have descended, by 
fore-sight, upon a later age than his own, and an- 
ticipated the reign of Christian poetry and art under 
Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one of 
those nights of the beautiful house of Cecilia, its 
flowers and lights, of Cecilia herself moving among 
the lilies, with a grace enhanced as things sometinies 
are in healthy dreams, it was indeed hardly an an- 
ticipation. He had lighted, by one of the peculiar 
intellectual good fortunes of his life, upon a period 
when, even more than in the days of austere ascesls 
which had preceded and were to follow it, the 
church was true for a moment, truer perhaps than 
she would ever be again, to that element of profound 
serenity in the soul of her founder, which reflected 
the eternal goodwill of God to man, "in whom," 
according to the oldest version of the angelic mes- 
sage, " He is well-pleased." 

For what Christianity did centuries later in the 
way of informing an art, a poesy, of higher and 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 331 

graver beauty, as some may think, than even Greek 
art and poetry at their best, was in truth conform- 
able to the original tendency of its genius ; miscar- 
ried, indeed, in the true dark ages, through many 
circumstances, of which the later persecutions it sus- 
tained, beginning with that under Aurelius himself, 
constituted one ; the blood of martyrs ceasing at a 
particular period to be the true " seed of the church." 
The original capacity of the catholic church in this 
direction, amply asserted, as 1 have said, in the New 
Testament, was also really at work, in that her first 
early " Peace," under the Antonines — the minor 
" Peace of the church," as we might call it, in dis- 
tinction from the final " Peace of the church," com- 
monly so-called, under Constantine. Francis of 
Assisi, with his following in the sphere of poetry and 
the arts — the voice of Dante, the hand of Giotto — giv- 
ing visible feature and color, and a palpable place 
among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish 
a real continuity, suspended in part by those troub- 
lous intervening centuries, with the gracious spirit of 
the primitive church in that first early springtide of 
her prosperity : as that also is continuous with the 
divine happiness, the peace, of her Founder. Con- 
stantine's later " Peace," on the other hand, in many 
ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the puri- 
tanism, the ascetic or monastic gloom of the church 
in the period between Aurelius and the first Chris- 
tian emperor, soured a little by oppression and mis- 
construction, and driven inward upon herself in a 
world of tasteless controversy : the church then 



332 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

finally coming to terms, and effecting something 
more than a inodus viveadi with the world, at a less 
fortunate moment of the world's development.^ 

Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time 
had gone by when men became Christians under the 
influence of some sudden overpowering impression, 
and with all the untranquilizing effects of such a 
crisis. At tliis period a majority perhaps liad been 
born Christians, had been ever with peaceful hearts 
in their Father's house. Millenarianism — the expec- 
tation of the speedy coming of judgment — with all 
the consequences it involved in men's tempers, was 
dying out. Every day the contrast between the 
church and the world vras becoming less trenchant. 
And now also, as the church rested awhile from 
persecution, that rapid self-development outward 
from wnthin, proper to a period of peace, was in 
progress. Antoninus Pius indeed, far more truly than 
Marcus Aurelius, belonged to that group of pagan 
saints forw^hom Dante, like Augustine, has provided 
in his scheme of the house with many mansions. A 
sincere old lioman piety urged his fortunately con- 
stituted nature to no mistakes, no offenses against 
humanity. There w^as a kind of guilelessness in him, 
one reward of which was this singular happiness, 
that under his reign there was no shedding of Chris- 
tian blood. To him belonged that half-humorous 
placidity of soul, of a kind illustrated later very ef- 
fectively by Montaigne, which, starting with an in- 
stinct of mere fairness towards human nature and 
1 Compare Mill on Liberty, page 50. 



3IARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 333 

the world, at last actually qualifies its possessor to 
be almost the friend of the people of Christ. Itself, 
in its own nature, simple, amiable, full of a reason- 
able gayety, Christianity has often had its advan- 
tage of characters like that. And this geniality of 
Antoninus Pius, like the geniality of the old earth 
itself, caused the church, which is indeed no alien 
from that old mother earth, to expand and thrive as 
by natural process, under his sight. " The period of 
the ernbryogeny of Christianity," says M. Renan, 
" was then complete. At that date the infant is in 
possession of all its organs, is detached from its 
mother, and will live henceforward by its own proper 
powers of life." And the beautiful chapter of this 
charmed period of the church under the Antonines, 
up to the later years of the reign of Aurelius, con- 
tains, as one of its elements of interest, the earliest 
development of Christian ritual under the presi- 
dency of the church of Rome. 

Again as in one of those quaint, mystical visions 
of the Shepherd of Hennas^ " the aged woman, that 
true Sibyl, had become more and more youthful : 
And in the third vision she was quite 3^oung, and 
radiant with beauty ; only her hair was that of an 
aged woman : And at the last she was joyous, and 
seated upon a throne " — seated upon a throne, " be- 
cause her position is a strong one." The subterra- 
nean worship of the church properly belonged to 
those periods of her early history in which her wor- 
ship was made penal: at other times it blossomed 
broadlv above ground, sometimes for length v inter- 



334 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

vals. Hiding herself for awhile when persecution 
became violent, she resumed, when there was felt to 
be no more than ordinary danger, " her free yet 
modest ways." And the sort of outward prosperity 
which she was enjoying in the period of her first 
"Peace" was reinforced by the decision at this 
moment of a crisis in her internal history. 

In the life of the church, as m all the moral life of 
mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which 
it is possible to follow — two conceptions, under one 
or the other of which we may represent to ourselves 
man's effort after the better life— corresponding to 
those two contrasted aspects, noted above, as discern- 
ible in the picture presented by the New Testament 
itself of the character of Christ. The ideal of As 
ceticism represents that moral effort as essentially a 
sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human nature to 
another, that it may live in what survives the more 
completely ; while the ideal of Culture represents it 
as a harmonious development of all the parts of human 
nature, in just proportion to each other. It Avas to 
the latter order of ideas that the church, and espe- 
cially the church of Rome, in this period of the An- 
tonines, was lending herself. In this earlier " Peace " 
she had set up for herself the ideal of spiritual devel- 
opment^ by an instinct, through which, in those serene 
moments, she was absolutely true to the peaceful soul 
of her Founder. " Goodwill to men," she said, "in 
whom God Himself is well-pleased ! " For a moment, 
at least, there was no foi-Cfnl opposition between the 
soul and the body, the wovld and the spirit, and the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 335 

grace of graciousness itself was pre-euiinentJy with 
the people of Christ. Tact, good sense — ever the note 
of a true orthodoxy — the merciful compromises of 
the church (indicative of her imperial vocation in re- 
fi-ard to all the varieties of human kind, with a uni- 
versality of which the old Roman pastorship she was 
to supersede was but the prototype) had already be- 
come conspicuous, in spite of a discredited, irritating, 
vindictive society, all around her. 

Against that divine urbanity and moderation, the 
old Montanism we read of dimly, was a fanatical re- 
action — sour, falsely anti-mundane, ever with an air 
of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted distaste, in par- 
ticular, for all the peculiar graces of womanhood. 
By it, the desire to please was understood to come of 
the author of evil. In that interval of quietness, it 
was inevitable, by a law of reaction, that some such 
rigorism should arise. And again, it was the church 
of Rome especially, now becoming every day more 
and more the capital of the Christian world, feeling 
her way ali'eady to a universality of guidance in spir- 
itual things equal to that of the earlier Rome in the 
political order, and part of the secret of which must 
be a generous tolerance of diversities, which checked 
the nascent puritanism of that time, and vindicated 
for all Christian people a cheerful liberty of heart, 
against many a narrow group of sectaries ; all alike, 
in their different ways, accusers of the genial creation 
of God. In her full, fresh faith in the Evangele — in 
a real regeneration of the earth and tlie bod v, in the 
dignity of man's whole nature — for a moment, at 



336 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

least, at that critical period in the devolpment of 
Christianit}^ she was for reason, for common sense, 
for fairness to human nature, for the due place of 
woman in the church, and, generally, for what may 
be called the naturalness of Christianity^ ; as also for 
its comely order. It was through the bishops of 
Rome especially, now transforming themselves rap- 
idly in a really catholic sense into universal pastors, 
that she was defining for herself this humanist path. 
** The dignified ecclesiastical hierarchy claimed the 
right of absolution, and made use of it with an ease 
which scandalized the puritans." And as regards 
those who had fallen from faith in an hour of weak- 
ness, the church of Rome, especially, elected by no 
means to be as the elder brother of the prodigal son, 
but rather to pour her oil and wine into the aching 
wounds. 

And then, in this season of expansion, as if now at 
last the catholic church might venture to show her 
outward lineaments as they really were, worship — 
the beauty of holiness, nay ! the elegance of sanctity 
— and here again under the presidenc}^ of the church 
of Rome, was developing, with a bold and confident 
gladness, such as has not been the ideal of worship 
in anv later age of the church. The tables were 
turned, and the prize of a cheerful temper on a sur- 
vey of life was no longer with the Greek. The ses- 
thetic charm of the catholic church, her evocative 
power over all that is eloquent and expressive in the 
better soul of man, her outward comeliness, her dig- 
nifying convictions about human nature — all this, ai- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 337 

abundantly realized centuries later by Dante and 
Giotto, by the great church-builders, by the great 
ritualists like Gregory, and the masters of sacred 
music in the middle age — we may see, in dim antici- 
pation, in that charmed space towards the end of the 
second century. Dissipated, or turned aside, partly 
through the great mistake of Marcus Aurelius, for a 
short time we may discern that influence clearly pre- 
dominant there. "What mio:ht seem harsh as doo^ma 
was already justifying itself as worship ; according 
to the sound rule — Lex orandi^ lex credendi. 

The marvelous liturgic spirit of the church, her 
wholly unparalleled genius for worship, being thus 
awake, she was rapidly reorganizing both pagan and 
Jewish elements of ritual, for the expanding therein 
of her own new heart of devotion. The ritual system 
of the church, which must rank as we see it in his- 
toric retrospect, like the Gothic architecture for in- 
stance, as one of the great, conjoint, and, so to term 
them, necessary^ products of human mind, and which 
has ever since directed, with so deep a fascination, 
men's religious instincts, was then growing together, 
85 a recognizable new treasure in the sum of things. 
And what has been on the whole the method of the 
church, as " a power of sweetness and patience," in 
dealing with matters like pagan art, was already 
manifest : it has the character of the divine modera- 
tion of Christ himself. It was onlv amono^ the io^no- 
rant, only in the " villages," that Christianity, even 
when victorious over paganism, was really icono- 
clastic. In the great *' Peace " under Constantine, 

22 



338 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

while there was plenty of destructive fanaticism in 
the country, the revolution was accomplished in the 
large towns, following the Eoman pattern, in a man- 
ner more orderly and discreet. The faithful were 
bent less on the destruction of the pagan temples than 
on the conversion of them and of their furniture to 
better use ; and the temples became Christian sanc- 
tuaries, with much beautiful furniture ready to hand. 
— In hoc warinore gentiliwni olim incensa fuma- 
hant. 

Already, in accordance with this later wisdom, 
that church of the minor " Peace " had adopted 
many of the beauties of pagan feeling and pagan 
custom ; as being indeed a living creature, taking up, 
transforming, and accommodating still more closely 
to the human heart, what of right belonged to it. 
It was thus that an obscure synagogue expanded 
into the catholic church. Gathering, from a richer 
and more varied field of sound than remained for 
him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes of 
which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after 
generations of interrupted development, formed into 
the Gregorian music, she was already, as we have 
seen, the house of song — of a wonderful new music 
and poesy. As if in anticipation of the sixteenth 
century, the church was becoming Jntmanistic^ in a 
best and earliest Renaissance. Sinofing- there had 
been in abundance from the first ; but often it dared 
only be " of the heart." It broke out, when it might, 
into tlie beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; 
the Jewish psalter, which it had inherited from the 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 339 

synagogue, turning now, gradually, from Greek into 
broken Latin— into Italian ; as the ritual use of the 
rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the 
earlier language of the church. And through certain 
surviving remnants of Greek in the later Latin 
liturgies, we may still discern a highly interesting 
intermediate phase of ritual development, in which 
the Greek and Latin were in combination ; the poor, 
surely — the poor and the children, of that liberal 
Eoman church— already responding in their own 
" vulgar tongue," to an office said in the original, 
liturgical Greek : and thus that hymn sung in the 
early morning, of which Pliny had heard, grew into 
the service of the Mass. 

The Mass, indeed, would seem to have been said 
continuously from the time of the Apostles. Its de- 
tails, as one by one they become visible in later his- 
tory, have already the character of what is ancient 
and venerable. "We are very old, and ye are 
young ! " they seem to protest, to those who fail to 
understand them. Eitual, indeed, like other elements 
of religion, must grow and cannot be made— grow 
by the same law of development which has prevailed 
in all the rest of the moral world. In this particular 
phase of the religious life, however, that develop- 
ment seems to have been an unusually rapid one, in 
the subterranean age which preceded Constantine ; 
doubtless, there also, more especially in such time of 
partial reconciliation as that minor " Peace : " and 
in the very first days of the final triumph of tlie 
rhurch the Mass emerges to general view already 



340 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

substantially complete. Thus did the liturgy of the 
church grow up, full of consolations for the human 
soul, and destined, surely, one day, under the sanc- 
tion of so many ages of human experience, to take 
exclusive possession of the religious consciousness. 
" Wisdom " was dealing, as with the dust of creeds 
and philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn 
religious usage, like the very spirit of life itself, or- 
ganizing souls and bodies out of the lime and clay of 
the earth, adopting, in a generous eclecticism, within 
the church's liberty and as by some providential 
power in her, as in other matters so in ritual, one 
thing here another there, from various sources — 
Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan — to adorn and beautify the 
greatest act of worship the world has seen — 

Pulchrius ecce nitet renovati gloria fontis I 
Cede vetus numen I novitati cede vetustas I 



CHAPTEE XXIIl. 

SAPIENTIA ^DIFICAVIT SIBI DOMUM. 

** Wisdom hath builded herself a house: she hath mingled her 
wine: she hath also prepared foi' herself a table.'' 

The great, favored ages of imaginative art present 
instances of the summing up of a wiiole world of 
complex associations under some single form, like 
the Zeus of Oljmpia, or the series of frescoes which 
commemorate ^A^ Acts of Saint Fraiicis, at Assisi; 
or like the play of Hamlet or Faust. It was not in 
an image, or series of images, yet still in a sort of 
dramatic action, and with the unity of a single appeal 
to eye and ear, that Marius, about this time, found 
all his new impressions set forth, regarding what he 
had already recognized, intellectually, as for him, at 
least, the most beautiful thing in the world. 

To understand the influence over him of what 

iollows you must remember that it was an experience 

which came in the midst of a deep sense of vacuity 

in things. The fairest products of the earth seemed 

to be dropping to pieces, as if in men's very hands, 

around him ; and still, how real was their sorrow, 

and his ! " Observation of life " had come to be like 

the constant telling of a sorrowful rosarv, dav after 

34i 



342 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

day ; till, as if taking infection from the cloudy 
sorrow of the mind, the senses also, the eye itself, 
had grown faint and sick. And now it happened as 
with the actual morning on which he found himself 
a spectator of this new thing. The long winter had 
been a season of unvarying suUenness : at last, on 
this day he awoke at a sharp flash of lightning in 
the earliest twilight ; and in a little while the heavy 
rain had filtered the air; the clear light was abroad ; 
and, as though the spring had begun with a sudden 
leap in the heart of things, the whole scene around 
him lay like an untarnished picture beneath a sky 
of delicate blue. Under the spell of his late de- 
pression, Marius had suddenly determined to leave 
Kome for awhile. But desiring first to advertise 
Cornelius of his movements, and failing to find him 
in his lodgings, he had ventured, still early in the 
day, to seek him in the Cecilian villa. Passing 
through its silent and empty courtyard he loitered 
for a moment, to admire. Under the clear but im- 
mature light of the winter morning after the storm, 
all the details of form and color in the old marbles 
were distinctly visible; and with a sort of sad hard- 
ness (so it struck him), amid their beauty ; in them, 
and in all other details of the scene — the cypresses, 
the bunches of pale daffodils in the grass, the curves 
of the purple hills of Tusculum, with the drifts of 
virgin snow still lying in their hollows. 

The little open door, through which he passed from 
the courtyard, admitted him into what was plainly' 
the vast Lara/rium^ or domestic sanctuary, of the Ce- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 343 

cilian family, transformed in many particulars, but 
still richly decorated, and retaining much of its an- 
cient furniture in costly stone and metal-work. The 
peculiar half-light of dawn seemed to be lingering be- 
yond its hour upon its solemn marble walls ; and 
here, though at that moment in absolute silence, 
a great company of people was assembled. In that 
brief period of peace (the church emerging for 
awhile from jealously guarded subterranean life) the 
severity of her earlier rule of exclusion had been some- 
what relaxed ; and so it came to pass that, on this 
morning, Marius saw for the first time the wonder- 
ful spectacle — wonderful above all in its evidential 
power — of those who believe. 

There were noticeable, among those assembled, 
great varieties of rank, of age, of personal type. The 
Roman ingenutos^ with the white toga and gold ring, 
stood side by side with his slave : and the air of the 
whole company was, above all, a grave one, an air of 
recollection. Coming thus unexpectedly upon this 
large assembly, so entirely united, in a silence so pro- 
found, for some purpose unknown to him, Marius felt 
for a moment as if he had stumbled hy chance upon 
some great conspiracy. Yet that could scarcely be, 
for the people here collected niight have figured as 
the earliest handsel, or pattern, of anew world, from 
the very face of which discontent had passed away. 
Corresponding to the variety of human type there 
present, was the various expression of every type of 
human sorrow assuaged. What desire, and fulfil- 
ment of desire, had wrought so pathetically in the 



344 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

faces of these ranks of aged men and women of hum- 
ble condition ? Those young men, bent down so dis- 
creetly on the details of their sacred service, had 
faced life and were glad, by some science, or light 
of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly 
no parallel in the older world. Was some credible 
message from beyond " the flaming rampart of the 
world " — a message of hope, regarding the place of 
men's souls and their interest in the sum of things — 
already molding their very bodies, and looks and 
voices, now and here ? At least, there was a kin- 
dling flame at work in them, which seemed to make 
everything else Marius had ever known look com- 
paratively vulgar and mean. There were the chil- 
dren, above all — troops of children — who reminded 
him of those pathetic children's graves, like cradles 
or garden-beds, he had noticed in his first visit to 
these places ; and they more than satisfied the 
odd curiosity he had then felt about them, wonder- 
ing in what quaintly expressive forms they might 
come forth into the daylight, if awakened from their 
sleep. Children of the Catacombs, some but " a 
span long," with features not so much beautiful as 
neroic (that Avorldof new, refining sentiment having 
set its seal even on childhood, like everything else 
in Rome, naturally heroic), they retained, certainly, 
no spot or trace of anything subterranean this morn- 
ing, in the alacrity of their worship — as ready as if 
they had been at their play — stretching forth their 
hands, crying, chanting in a resonant voice, and with 
boldly upturned faces, Christe EleUon / 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 345 

For the silence — silence, amid those lights of earl^f 
morning, to which Marius had always been consti- 
tutionally impressible, as having in them a certain 
reproachful austerity — was broken suddenly by re- 
sounding cries of Kyrie Eleison ! Christe Eleison ! 
repeated again and again alternately, until the 
bishop, rising from his throne, made sign that this 
prayer should cease. But the voices burst out again 
soon afterwards in a richer and more varied melody, 
though still antiphonal ; the men, the women and 
children, the deacons and the congregation, answering 
each other, as in a Greek chorus. But, again, with 
what a novelty of poetic accent; what a genuine ex- 
pansion of heart ; what profound intimations for the 
intellect, as the meaning of the words grew upon him j 
The " hymn," of which Pliny had heard something, 
had grown into this. Cum grandi affectu et com- 
^unctione dicatur — says an ancient eucharistic order ; 
and certainly, the mystic tone of this praying and 
singing was one with the expression of deliverance, 
of grateful assurance and sincerity, upon the faces 
of those assembled. As if some profound correction, 
and regeneration of the body by the spirit, had been 
begun, and already gone a great way, the counte- 
nances of men, women, and children had a brightness 
upon them which he could fancy reflected upon him- 
self — an amenity, a mystic amiability and unction, 
which found its way, most readily of all, to the 
hearts of children themselves. The religious poetry 
of those Hebrew psalms — Benedixisti Domine terram 
ttcam : Dixit Dominus Dom^ino meOy sede a dextris 



346 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

f7^^^5— was in marvelous accord with the lyrical in' 
stinct of his own character. Those august hymns, 
he thought, would remain ever hereafter one of the 
well-tested powers among things, to soothe and 
fortify his soul. One could never grow tired of 
them ! 

In the old pagan worship there had been little to 
call out the intelligence. The eloquence of worship, 
which Marius found here — an eloquence, wherein 
there were many very various ingredients, of which 
that singing was only one — presented, as he gradually 
came to see, a fact, or series of facts, for intellectual 
reception. This became evident, more especially, in 
those lections, or sacred readings, which, like the 
singing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at 
certain intervals, amid the silence of the assembly. 
There were readings, again with bursts of chanted 
invocation between for fuller light on a difficult path, 
in which many a vagrant voice of human philosophy, 
haunting men's minds from of old, came sounding 
in clearer tones than had ever belonged to them 
before ; as if lifted, above their natural purpose, into 
the harmonies of some more masterly system of 
knowledge. And last of all came a narrative, in a 
form which every one appeared to know by heart 
with a thousand tender memories, and which dis- 
played, in all the vividness of a picture for the eye, 
the mournful figure of him, towards whom the in- 
tention of this whole act of worship was directed — 
a figure which seemed to have absorbed, like a 
tincture of deep dyes into his vesture, all that was 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 347 

deep-felt and impassioned in the experiences of the 
past. 

It was the anniversary of his birth as a little child 
they were celebrating to-day. Astiterunt reges terrm 
— proceeded the Sequence^ the young men on the 
steps of the altar responding in deep, clear, antiphon 
or chorus — 

Astiterunt reges terrae — 

Adversus sanctum puerum tuura, Jesum : 

Nunc, Domine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum — 

Et signa fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu ! 

And the proper action of the rite itself, like a half- 
opened book to be read by the duly initiated mind, 
took up those suggestions, and carried them on into 
the present, as having reference to a power still effi- 
cacious, and in action among the people there as- 
sembled, in some mystic sense. The whole office, 
indeed, with its interchange of lections, hymns r.nd 
silences, was itself like a single piece of highly com> 
posite, dramatic music ; a " song of degrees," rising 
to a climax. Notwithstanding the absence of any 
definite or central visible image, the entire cere- 
monial process, like the place in which it was enacted, 
seemed weighty with symbolical significance, and 
expressed a single leading motive. It was in the 
actions of one person that the whole mystery cen- 
tered. Distinguished among his assistants, who 
stood ranged in semicircle around him (themselves 
parted from the general congregation b}^ transennoe^ 
or lattice- work, of pierced white marble) by the ex- 



348 MARIUS THE EPICUREAX. 

trerae fineness or whiteness of his vesture, and the 
pointed cap with golden ornaments on his head, this 
person, nevertlieless, struck Marius as having some- 
thing about him like one of the wuld shepherds of 
the Cmnpagiia. 

And yet he had never seen the pontifical character, 
as he conceived it — sicut unguentum in capite descent 
dens in orarn vesihnenti — so fully realized^ as in the 
expression, the voice and manner of action, of this 
novel pontiff, as he took his seat on the white chair 
placed for him by the young men, and received his 
long staff into his hand, or moved his hands — hands 
seeming to be indeed endowed with mysterious, 
hidden powers — at the Lavabo^ or at the various 
benedictions, or to bless certain objects on the table 
before him, chanting in cadence of a grave sweet- 
ness the leading parts of the rite. What profound 
unction and mysticity ! The solemnity of the sing- 
ing was at its height when he opened his lips. It 
was as if, a new sort of rha/ps6dos, he alone pos- 
sessed the words of the ofBce, and they Avere flowing 
fresh from some source of inspiration within him. 
The table or altar at which he presided, below a 
canopy of spiral columns, and with the carved palm- 
branch, standing in the midst of a semicircle of seats 
for the priests, Avas in reality the tomb of a youth- 
ful " witness," of the family of the Cecilii, who had 
shed his blood not many years before, and whose 
relics were still in this place. It was for his sake 
that the bishop put his lips so often to the surface 
before him ; the regretful memory of this death Id-- 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 349 

tertwining itself, though with a note of triumph, as 
a matter of special inward signiRcancy, throughout 
this whole service, which was, besides other things, 
a commemoration of the whole number of the be- 
loved dead. 

It was a sacrifice also, in its essence — a sacrifice, 
it might seem, like the most primitive, natural, and 
enduringly significant, of old pagan sacrifices, of the 
simplest fruits of the earth. And in connection with 
this circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the 
building so in the rite itself, it was not so much a 
new matter, as a new spirit which Marius observed, 
molding, informing, with a new intention, many 
observances which he did not witness now for the 
first time. Men and women came to the altar suc- 
cessively, in perfect order ; and deposited there, be- 
low the marble lattice, their baskets filled with wheat 
and grapes, their incense, and oil for the lamps of the 
sanctuary ; bread and wine especially — pure wheaten 
bread, and the pure white wine of the Tusculan 
vineyards. It was a veritable consecration, hopeful 
and animating, of the earth's gifts, of all that we can 
touch and see — of old dead and dark matter itself, 
somehow redeemed at last, in the midst of a jaded 
world that had lost the true sense of it, and in strong 
contrast to the wise emperor's renunciant and im- 
passive attitude towards it. Certain portions of that 
bread and wine were selected by the bishop ; and 
thereafter it was with an increasing mysticity and 
effusion that the rite proceeded. Like an invocation 
or supplication^ full of a powerful inhreafMng ur 



850 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

gmpneusis — the antiphonal singing developed, from 
this point, into a kind of solemn dialogue between 
the chief ministrant and the whole assisting com- 
pany — 

SURSUM CORDA ! 

HABEMUS AD DOMINUM. 

GRATIAS AGAMUS DOMINO DEO NOSTROI— 

It was the service, especially, of young men, stand- 
ing there, in long ranks, arrayed in severe and sim- 
ple vesture of pure white — a service in which they 
would seem to be flying for refuge (with their youth 
itself, as a treasure in their hands to be preserved) to 
one like themselves, whom they were also ready to 
worship ; to worship, above all in the way of Aure- 
lius, by imitation and conformity to his image. 
Adoramus te Christe^ quia per crucem tuam redemisti 
mundum ! — the\^ cried together. So deep was the 
emotion, that, at moments, it seemed to Marius as if 
some at least there present perceived the very object 
of all this pathetic crying himself drawing near. 
Throughout the rite there had been a growing sense 
and assurance of one coming — Yes ! actually with 
them now ; according to the oft-repeated prayer or 
affirmation, Dominus vobiscum ! Some at least were 
quite sure of it : and the confidence of this remnant 
fired the hearts, and gave meaning to the bold, ec- 
static worship, of all the rest about them. 

Helped especially by the suggestions of that mys- 
terious old Hebrew psalmody, to him so new — lection 
and hymn — and catching therewith a portion of the 
enthusiasm of those around hiro, Marius could dis- 



Maruts the epicurean. 351 

cern dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now 
followed (at once a narrative and an invocation or 
prayer) the most touching image he had ever beheld. 
It was the image of a young man giving up, one 
by one, for tha greatest of ends, the greatest gifts ; 
parting with himself, and, above all, with the serenity, 
the deep and divine serenity, of his own mind ; yet, 
from the midst of his distress, crying out upon the 
greatness of his success, as if foreseeing this very 
worship. As the center of the supposed facts, which 
for these people had become so constraining a motive 
of activity and hope, this image seemed to propose 
itself with an overwhelming claim on human grati- 
tude. What Saint Lewis of France discerned, and 
found so irresistibly touching, through the dimness 
of many centuries, as a painful thing done for love 
of him by one he had never seen, was, to them, a 
thing of yesterday ; and their hearts were whole 
with it : it had the force, among their interests, of 
an almost recent event in the career of one whom 
their fathers' fathers might have known. From 
memories so sublime, yet so close to Vhem, had the 
narration descended in which these acts of worship 
centered ; and again the names of the more recent 
dead were mingled with it. And it seemed as if 
the very dead were aware ; to be stirring beneath 
the slabs of the sepulchers which lay so near, that 
they might associate themselves to that enthusiasm 
— to that exalted worship of Jesus. 

One by one, the faithful approached, and received 
from the chief ministrant portions of the great, white. 



352 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

wheaten cake, he had taken into his hands — Perdu- 
cat vos ad vitani ceterjiarn t — he prays, half-silently, 
as they depart again, after discreet embraces. The 
Eucharist of those early days was, even more com- 
pletely than at any later or happier time, an act of 
thanksgiving ; and while what remained was borne 
away for the reception of the sick, the sustained 
gladness of the rite reached its highest point in the 
singing of a hymn : a hymn which was as the 
spontaneous product of two opposed companies or 
powers, yet contending accordantly together, accu- 
mulating and heightening their witness, and provok- 
ing each other's worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry. 
Ite ! missa est ! — cried the young deacons : and 
Marius departed from that strange scene with the 
rest. What was this ? — Was this what made the 
way of Cornelius so pleasant through the world ? 
As for himself : the natural soul of worship in him 
had at last been satisfied as never before. He felt, 
as he left that place, that he must often hereafter 
experience a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for 
all that, over again. Moreover, it seemed to define 
what he must require of the powers, whatsoever they 
mio:ht be, that had brouo^ht him into the world at 
all, to make him not unhappy in it. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINABT. 

In cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says 
Vliny —studia hilaritate jproveniunt. It was still the 
habit of Marius, encouraged by his experience that 
sleep is not only a sedative but the best of stimulants, 
to seize the morning hours for creation, making profit 
when he might of the wholesome serenity which 
followed a dreamless night. " The morning for 
creation," he would say ; " afternoon for the per- 
fecting labor of the file ; the evening for reception 
— the reception of matter from without one, of other 
men's words and thoughts — matter for our own 
dreams, or the merely mechanic exercise of the brain, 
brooding thereon silently, in its dark chambers." It 
was therefore a rare thing for him to leave home 
early in the day. One day he had been induced to 
do so, on the occasion of a visit to Eome of the 
famous writer Lucian, whom he had been bidden to 
meet. The breakfast over, he walked away with the 
learned guest, having offered to be his guide to the 
lecture-room of a well-known Greek rhetorician and 
expositor of the Stoic philosophy, a teacher then 
much in fashion among the studious youth of Rome. 
23 353 



354: MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

On reaching the place, however, they found the doors 
closed, with a slip of writing attached, which pro- 
claimed " a holiday ; " and the morning being a fine 
one, they strolled further, along the Appian Way. 
Mortality, with which the Queen of Ways — in reality 
the favorite cemetery of Rome — was so closely 
crowded, in every imaginable form of sepulcher, from 
the tiniest baby-house, to the massive towers out of 
which the Middle Ages would adapt a fortress, might 
seem, on a mornmglike this, to be " smiling through 
tears." The flower-stalls just beyond the city gates 
presented to view an array of garlands and posies, 
fresh enough for a wedding. At one and another of 
them groups of persons, gravely clad, were making 
their bargains before starting off to a perhaps distant 
spot on the highway, to keep a dies rosationis (as this 
was the time of roses) at the grave of a deceased 
relation. Here and there, an actual funeral pro- 
cession was slowly on its way, in weird contrast to 
the gayety of the hour. 

The two companions, of course, read the epitaphs 
as they strolled along. In one, reminding them of 
the poet's — Si lacriyncB prosunt^ visis te ostende videri / 
— a woman prayed that her lost husband might visit 
her dreams. Their characteristic note, indeed, was 
an imploring crv, still to be sought after by the 
living. " While I live," was the promise of a lover 
to his dead mistress, '' you will receive this homage: 
after my death, — who can tell ? ''''—■jpost moi'temnescio, 
'• If ghosts, my sons, do feel anything after death, 
my sorrow will be lessened by your frequent coming 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 355 

to me here ! " — '^ This is d^ privileged tomb ; to my 
family and descendants has been conceded the right 
of visiting this place as often as they please." — " This 
is an eternal habitation ; here lie I ; here I shall lie 
for ever." — " Reader! if you doubt that the soul sur- 
vives, make your oblation and a prayer for me ; and 
you shall understand ! " 

The elder of the two readers, certainl}^ was little 
aifected by those pathetic sugf^^estions. It was long 
ao:o that havino^ visited the banks of the Padus, and 
asked in vain for the poplars which were the sisters 
of Phaethon, and whose tears were amber, he had 
once for all arranged for himself a view of the world 
which excluded all reference to w^hat might lie be- 
yond its " flaming barriers." And at the age of 
sixtv he had no miso:ivino:s. His eleeant and self- 
complacent, but far from unamiable, skepticism, long 
since brought to perfection, never failed him. It 
surrounded him, as some are surrounded by a magic 
ring of fine aiistocratic manners, with " a rampart," 
through which he himself never broke, nor permitted 
any thing or person to break upon him. Gay, ani- 
mated, content with his old age as it was, the aged 
student still took a lively interest in studious youth. 
— Could Marius inform him of any such, now known 
to him in Eome ? What did the young men learn, 
just then ? and how ? 

In answer, Marius became fluent concerning the 
promise of one young student, the son, as it presently 
appeared, of parents of whom Lucian himself knew 
something : and soon afterwards the lad was seen 



356 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

coming along briskly — a lad with gait and figure well 
enough expressive of the sane mind in the healthy 
body, though a little slim and worn of feature, and 
with a pair of eyes expressly designed, it might seem, 
for fine glancings at the stars. At the sight of 
Marius he paused suddenly, and with a modest blush 
on recognizing his companion, who straightway took 
with the youth, so prettily enthusiastic, the freedom 
of an old friend. 

In a few moments the three were seated together, 
immediately above the frao;rant borders of a rose- 
farm, on the marble bench of one of the exhedrce 
for the use of foot-passengers at the roadside, from 
which they could overlook the grand, earnest pros- 
pect of the Campagna^ and enjoy the air. Fancy- 
hig that the lad's plainly written enthusiasm had 
induced in the elder speaker a somewhat greater 
fervor than was usual with him, Marius listened to 
'-he conversation which follows — 

" Ah ! Hermotimus ! Hurrying to lecture ! — if 
[ may judge b}^ your pace, and that volume in your 
hand. You were thinking hard as you came along, 
moving your lips and waving your arm : some fine 
speech you were pondering, some knotty question 
or viewy doctrine — not to be idle for a moment, to 
be making progress in philosophy, even on your 
way to the schools. To-day, however, you need go 
no further. We read a notice at the schools that 
there would be no lecture. Stay therefore, and 
talk awhile with us. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 357 

—With pleasure, Lucian.— Yes! I was ruminat- 
ing yesterday's conference. One must not lose a 
moment. Life is short and art is long ! And it was 
of the art of medicine, that was first said~a thing 
so much easier than divine philosophy, to which one 
can hardly attain in a lifetime, unless one be ever 
wakeful, ever on the w^atch. And here the hazard is 
no httle one— By the attainment of a true philosophy 
to attain happiness ; or, having missed both, to perish, 
as one of the vulgar herd. 

— The prize is a great one, Hermotimus ! and you 
must needs be near it, after these months of toil, and 
with that scholarly pallor of yours. Unless, indeed, 
you have already laid hold upon it, and kept usr in 
the dark. 

—How could that be, Lucian? Happiness, as 
Hesiod says, abides very far hence ; and the way to 
it is long and steep and rough. I see myself still 
at the beginning of my journey ; still but at the 
mountain's foot. I am trying with all my might to 
get forward. What I need is a hand, stretched out 

to help me. 

— And is not the master sufficient for that ? Could 
he not, like Zeus in Homer, let down to you, from 
that high place, a golden cord, to draw you up 
thither, to himself and to that Happiness, to which 
he ascended so long ago ? 

—The very point, Lucian ! If it had depended on 
him I should long ago have been caught up. 'Tis I 
am wanting. 



> 358 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

— Well ! keep your eye fixed on tlie journey's end, 
and the happiness there above, with confidence in 
his goodwill. 

— Ah ! there are many who start cheerfully on 
the journey and proceed a certain distance, but lose 
heart when they light on the obstacles of the way. 
Only, those who endure to the end do come to the 
mountain's top, and thereafter live in Happiness : — 
live a wonderful manner of life, seeing all other 
people from that great height no bigger than tiny 
ants. 

— What little fellows you make of us — less than 
the pygmies — down in the dust here. Well ! we, 
*the vulgar herd,' as we creep along, will not forget 
you in our prayers, when you are seated up there 
above the clouds, whither you have been so long 
hastening. But tell me, Hermotimus ! — when do you 
expect to arrive there 'i 

— Ah ! that I know not. In twenty years, per- 
haps, I shall be really on the summit. — A great 
while ! you think. But then, again, the prize I con- 
tend for is a great one. 

— Perhaps ! But as to those twenty years — that 
you will live so long. — Has the master assured you 
of that? Is he a prophet as well as a philosopher? 
For I suppose you would not endure all this, upon 
a mere chance — toiling day and night, though it 
might happen that just ere the last step, Destiny 
seized you by the foot and plucked you thence, with 
your hope still unfulfilled. 

— Hence, with these ill-omened words, Lucian I 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 359 

Were I to survive but for a day, I should be happy, 
having once attained wisdom. 

— How ? — Satisfied with a single day, after all 
those labors ? 

— Yes ! one blessed moment were enough ! 

— But again, as you have never been thither, how 
know you that happiness is to be had up there, at 
all — the happiness that is to make all this worth 
while? 

— I believe what the master tells me. Of a cer- 
taintv he knows, beino^ now far above all others. 

— And what was it he told you about it ? Is it 
riches, or glory, or some indescribable pleasure? 

— Hush ! my friend ! All those are nothing in 
comparison of the life there ! 

— What, then, shall those who come to the end of 
this discipline — what excellent thing shall they re- 
ceive, if not these ? 

— Wisdom, the absolute goodness and the absolute 
beauty, with the sure and certain knowledge of all 
things — how they are. Kiches and glory and pleas- 
ure — whatsoever belongs to the body — they have 
cast from them : stripped bare of all that, they mount 
up, even as Hercules, consumed in the fire, became 
a god. He too cast aside all that he had of his 
earthly mother, and bearing with him the divine 
element, pure and undefiled, winged his way to 
heaven from the discerning flame. Even so do they, 
detached from all that others prize, by the burning 
fii-e of a true philosophy, ascend to the highest degree 
of happiness. 



360 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

— Strange ! And do they never come down again 
from the heights to help those whom they left below ? 
Must they, when they be once come thither, there 
remain forever, laughing, as 3^ou say, at what other 
men prize ? 

— More than that ! They whose initiation is entire 
are subject no longer to anger, fear, desire, regret. 
Nay ! They scarcely feel at all. 

— Well ! as you have leisure to-day, why not tell 
an old friend in what way you first started on your 
philosophic journey ? For, if I might, I should like 
to join company with you from this very day. 

— If you be really willing, Lucian ! you will learn 
in no long time your advantage over all other people. 
They will seem but as children, so far above them 
will be your thoughts. 

— Well ! Be you my guide ! It is but fair. But 
tell me — Do you allow learners to contradict, if any- 
thing is said which they don't think right! 

— No, indeed ! Still, if you wish, oppose your 
questions. In that way you will learn more 
easily. 

— Let me know, then — Is there one only way 
which leads to a true philosophy — your own way — 
the way of the Stoics : or is it true, as I have heard, 
that there are many ways of approaching it ? 

— Yes ! Many ways ! There are the Stoics, and 
the Peripatetics, and those who call themselves after 
Plato : there are the enthusiasts for Diogenes, and 
Antisthenes, and the followers of Pythagoras, be- 
sides others. 



MARIUM THE F.PIClJREAN. 3G1 

—It was true, then. But again, is what they say 
the same or different ? 

— Yery different. 

— Yet the ti'uth, 1 conceive, Avould be one and the 
same, from all of them. Answer me then — In what, 
or whom, did you confide when you first betook 
yourself to philosophy, and seeing so many doors 
open to you, passed them all by and went in to the 
Stoics, as if there alone lay the way of truth ? What 
token had you ? Forget, please, all you are to-day 
— halfway, or more, on the philosophic journey : an- 
swer me as you ^vould have done then, a mere out- 
sider as I am now. 

— Willingly ! It was there the great majority 
went ! 'Twas by that I judged it to be the better way. 

— A majority how much greater than the Epicu- 
reans, the Platonists, the Peripatetics ? You, doubt- 
less, counted them respectively, as with the votes in 
a scrutiny. 

— No ! But this was not my only motive. I 
heard it said by every one that the Epicureans were 
soft and voluptuous, the Peripatetics avaricious 
and quarrelsome, and Plato's followers puffed up 
with pride. But of the Stoics, not a few pronounced 
that they were true men, that they knew everything, 
that theirs was the royal road, the one road, to 
wealth, to wisdom, to all that can be desired. 

— Of course those who said this were not them- 
selves Stoics: you would not have believed them — 
still less their opponents. They were the vulgar, 
therefore. 



862 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

— True ! But you must know that Idid not trust 
to others exclusively. I trusted also to myself — to 
what I saw. I saw the Stoics going through the 
world after a seemly manner, neatly clad, never in 
excess, always collected, ever faithful to the mean 
which all pronounce golden. 

— You are trying an experiment on me. You 
would fain see how far you can mislead me as to 
your real ground. The kind of probation you de- 
scribe is applicable, indeed, to works of art, which 
are rightly judged by their appearance to the eye. 
There is somethino: in the comelv form, the graceful 
drapery, which tells surely of the hand of Pheidias 
or Alcaraenes. But if philosophy is to be judged by 
outward appearances, what would become of the 
blind man, for instance, unable to observe the attire 
and o^ait of vour friends the Stoics ? 

— It was not of the blind 1 was thinking. 

— Yet there must needs be some common crite. 
rion in a matter so important to all. Put the blind, 
if you will, beyond the privileges of philosophy ; 
though they perhaps need that inward vision more 
than all others. But can those who are not blind, be 
they as keen -sigh ted as you will, collect a single fact 
of mind from a man's attire, from anything out- 
ward ? — Understand me ! You attached yourself to 
these men — did you not? — because of a certain love 
you had for the mind in them, the thoughts they 
had, desiring the mind in you to be improved there* 
by? 

— Assuredly ! 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 363 

— How, then, did you find it possible, by the sort 
of signs you just now spoke of, to distinguish the 
true philosopher from the false? Matters of that 
kind are not wont so to reveal themselves. They 
are but hidden mysteries, hardly to be guessed at 
through the words and acts which may in some sort 
be conformable to them. You, however, it would 
seem, can look straight into the heart in men's bos- 
oms, and acquaint yourself with what really passes 
there. 

— You are making sport of me, Lucian ! In truth, 
it was with God's help I made my choice, and 1 
don't repent it. 

— And still you refuse to tell me, to save me from 
perishing in that ' vulgar herd.' 

— Because nothing I can tell you would satisfy 
you. 

— You are mistaken, my friend! But since you 
deliberately conceal the thing, grudging me, as I 
suppose, that true philosophy which would make me 
equal to you, I will tr}^ if it may be, to find out for 
myself the exact criterion in these matters — how to 
make a perfectly safe choice. And, do you listen. 

— I will ; there may be something worth knowing 
in what you will say. 

— Well! — only don't laugh if I seem a little fum- 
bling in my efforts. The fault is yours, in refusing 
to share your lights with me. Let Philosophy, then, 
be like a city — a city whose citizens within it are a 
happy people, as your master would tell you, having 
laiely come thence, as we suppose. All the virtues 



364 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

are theirs, and they are little less than gods. Those 
acts of violence which happen among us are not to 
be seen in their streets. They live together in one 
mind, very seemly ; the things which beyond any- 
thing else cause men to contend against each other, 
having no place among them. Gold and silver, 
pleasure, vainglory, they have long since banished, 
as being unprofitable to the commonwealth; and 
their life is an unbroken calm, in liberty, equality, 
an equal happiness. 

— And is it not reasonable that all men should 
desire to be of a city such as that, and take no ac- 
count of the length and difficulty of the way thither, 
so only they may one day become its freemen ? 

— It might well be the business of life:— leaving 
all else, forgetting one's native country here, un- 
moved by the tears, the restraining hands, of parents 
or children, if one had them — only bidding them 
follow the same road ; and if they would not or 
could not, shaking them off, leaving one's very 
garment in their hands if thev took hold on us, to 
start off straightway for that happy place ! For 
there is no fear, I suppose, of being shut out if one 
came thither naked. I remember, indeed, long ago 
an aged man related to me how things passed there, 
offering himself to be my leader, and enroll me on 
my arrival in the number of the citizens. I was but 
fifteen — certainlv verv foolish : and it mav be that 
I was then actually within the suburbs, or at the 
very gates, of the city. Well, this aged man told 
me, among other things, that all the citizens were 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 366 

wayfarers from afar. Among them were barbarians 
and slaves, poor men — ay ! and cripples — all indeed 
who truly desired that citizenship. For the only 
legal conditions of enrolment were — not wealth, nor 
bodily beauty, nor noble ancestry — things not named 
among them — but intelligence, and the desire for 
moral beauty, and earnest labor. The last comer, 
thus qualified, was made equal to the rest : master 
and slave, patrician, plebeian, were words they had 
not — in that blissful place. And believe me, if that 
blissful, that beautiful place, were set on a hill 
visible to all the world, I should long ago have jour- 
neyed thither. But, as you say, it is far off : and one 
must needs find out for oneself the road to it, 
and the best possible guide. And I find a multitude 
of guides, who press on me their services, and pro- 
test, all alike, that they have themselves come 
thence. Only, the roads they propose are many, 
and towards adverse quarters. And one of them is 
steep and stony, and through the beating sun ; and 
the other is through green meadows, and under 
oTateful shade, and bv manv a fountain of water. 
But howsoever the road may be, at each one of them 
stands a credible guide ; he puts out his hand and 
would have you come his way. All other ways are 
wrong, all other guides false. Hence my diffi- 
cQlty !— The number and variety of the ways ! For 
you know. There is hut one road that leads to 
Corinth. 

Well! If you go the whole round, you will 

find no better guides than those. If you wish to 



366 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

get to Corinth, you will follow the traces of Zeno 
and Chrysippus. It is impossible otherwise. 

— Yes ! The old, familiar language ! Were one 
of Plato's fellow-pilgrims here, or a follower of 
Epicurus— or fifty others — each would tell me that 
I should never get to Corinth except in his company. 
One must therefore credit all alike, which would be 
absurd ; or, what is far safer, distrust all alike, until 
one has discovered the truth. Suppose now, that, 
being as I am, ignorant which of all philosophers is 
really in possession of truth, I chose your sect, rely- 
ing on j^ourself — my friend, indeed, yet still ac- 
quainted only with the way of the Stoics : and that 
then some divine power brought Plato, and Aristotle, 
and Pythagoras, and the others, back to life again. 
Well ! They would come round about me, and put 
me on my trial for my presumption, and say — ' In 
whom was it you confided when you preferred Zeno 
and Chrysippus to me ? — and me ? — masters of far 
more venerable age than those, who are but of yes- 
terday ; and though j^ou have never held any dis- 
cussion with us, nor made trial of our doctrine ? It 
is not thus that the law would have judges do — 
listen to one party and refuse to let the other speak 
for himself. If judges act thus, there may be an 
appeal to another tribunal.' What should I answer ? 
Would it be enough to say — ' I trusted my friend 
Hermotimus ? ' — ' A¥e know not Hermotimus, nor 
he us,' they would tell me ; adding, with a smile, 
' your friend thinks he may believe all our adversa. 
ries say of us, whether in ignorance or in malice. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 367 

-Yet if he were umpire in the games, and if he hap- 
pened to see one of our wrestlers, by way of a pre- 
liminary exercise, knock to pieces an antagonist of 
mere empty air, he would not thereupon pronounce 
him a victor. Well ! don't let your friend Ilermoti- 
mus suppose, in like manner, that his teachers have 
really prevailed over us in those battles of theirs, 
fought with our mere shadows. That, again, were 
to be like children, lightly overthrowing their own 
card-castles ; or like boy -archers, who cry out when 
they hit the target of straw. The Persian and 
Scythian bowmen, as they speed along, can pierce a 
bird on the wing.' 

— Let us leave Plato and the others at rest. It is 
not for me to contend against them. Let us rather 
search out together if the truth of Philosophy be as 
I say. Why summon the athletes, and archers from 
Persia ? 

— Yes ! let them go, if you think them in the way. 
And now do you speak ! You really look as if you 
had something wonderful to deliver. 

— Well then, Lucian ! to me it seems- quite possible 
for one who has learned the doctrines of the Stoics 
only, to attain from those a knowledge of the truth, 
without proceeding to inquire into all the various 
tenets of the others. Look at the question in this 
way. If one told you that twice two make four, 
would it be necessary for you to go the whole round 
of the arithmeticians, to see whether any one of 
them will say that twice two make five, or seven ? 



^ ;S MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Would you not 6tQ at once that the man tells the 
truth ? 

— At once. 

— Why then do you find it impossible that one 
who has fallen in with the Stoics only, in their enun- 
ciation of what is true, should adhere to thera, and 
seek after no others ; assured that four could never 
be five, even if fifty Platos, fifty Aristotles said so ? 

— You are beside the point, Hermotimus ! You 
are likening open questions to principles universally 
received. Have you ever met any one who said that 
twice two make five, or seven ? 

— No ! only a madman would say that. 

— And have you ever met, on the other hand, a 
Stoic and an Epicurean who were agreed upon the 
beginning and the end, the principle and thfe final 
cause, of things? Never! Then your parallel is 
false. We are inquiring to which of the sects philo- 
sophic truth belongs, and you seize on it by anticipa- 
tion, and assign it to the Stoics, alleging, what is by 
no means clear, that it is they for whom twice two 
make four. But the Epicureans, or the Platonists, 
might say that it is they, in truth, who make two 
and two equal four, while 3^ou make them five or 
seven. Is it not so, when you think virtue the only 
good, and the E'picuresins pleasure ; when you hold 
all things to be material, while the Platonists admit 
something im-materialf As I said, you resolve off- 
hand, in favor of the Stoics, the very point which 
needs a critical decision. If it is clear beforehand 
that the Stoics alone make two and two equal four, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 369 

then the others must hold their peace. But so long 
as that is the very point of debate, we must listen to 
all sects alike, or be well-assured that we shall seem 
but partial in our judgment. 

— I think, Lucian ! that you do not altogether un- 
derstand my meaning. To make it clear, then, let 
us suppose that t\vo men have entered a temple, of 
^sculapius — say ; or Bacchus : and that afterwards 
one of the sacred vessels is found to be missing. 
And the two men must be searched to see which of 
them has hidden it under his garment. For it is 
certainly in the possession of one or the other of 
them. Well ! if it be found on the first there will 
be no need to search the second ; if it is not found 
on the first, then the other must have it ; and again, 
there will be no need to search him. 

—Yes ! So let it be. 

— And we too, Lucian ! if we have found the holy 
vessel in possession of the Stoics shall no longer 
have need to search other philosophers, having at- 
tained that we were seekino^. Whv trouble our- 
selves further ? 

— No need, if something had indeed been found, 
and you knew it to be that lost thing : if, at the least, 
you could recognize the sacred object when you saw 
it. But tru'iv, as the matter now stands, not two 
persons only have entei'ed the temple, one or the 
other of whom must needs have taken the golden 
eup, but a whole crowd of persons. And then, it is 
not clear what the lost object really is— cup, or 
flagon, or diadem ; for one of the priests avers this, 
24 



370 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

another that ; they are not even in agreement as to 
its material : some will have it to be of brass, others 
of silver, or gold. It thus becomes necessary to 
search the garments of all persons who have entered 
the temple, if the lost vessel is to be recovered. And 
if you find a golden cup on the first of them, it will 
still be necessary to proceed in searching the garments 
of the others ; for it is not certain that this cup 
really belonged to the temple. Might there not be 
many such golden vessels ? — IS'o ! we must go on to 
every one of them, placing all that we find in the 
midst together, and then make our guess which of 
all those things may fairly be supposed to be the 
property of the god. For, again, this circumstance 
adds greatly to our difficulty, that without exception 
every one searched is found to have something upon 
him — cup, or flagon, or diadem, of brass, of silver, 
of gold : and still, all the while, it is not ascertained 
which of all those is the sacred thing : and you must 
still hesitate to pronounce any one of them guilty of 
the sacrilege — those objects may be their own lawful 
property : one cause of all this obscurity being, as I 
think, that there was no inscription on the lost cup, 
if cup it was. Had the name of the god, or even 
that of the donor, been upon it, we should at least 
have had less trouble, and having detected the in- 
scription we should have ceased to trouble any one 
else bv our search. 

— I have nothing to reply to that. 

— Hardly anything plausible. So that if we wish 
t^ find wlio it is has the sacred vessel, or who will be 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 371 

our best guide to Corinth, we must needs proceed to 
every one and examine him with the utmost care, 
stripping off his garment and considering him closeh\ 
Scarcely, even so, shall we come at the truth. And 
if we are to have a credible adviser regarding this 
question of philosophy^ — which of all philosophies one 
ought to follow — he alone who is acquainted with 
the dicta of every one of them can be such a guide : 
all others must be inadequate. I would give no 
credence to them if they lacked information as to 
one only. If some one introduced a fair person and 
told us he was the fairest of all men, we should not 
believe that, unless we knew that he had seen all the 
people in the world. Fair he might be ; but, fairest 
of all — none could know, unless he had seen all. 
And we too desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of 
all. Unless we find him, we shall think we have 
failed. It is no casual beauty that will content us ; 
what we are seeking after is that supreme beauty 
which must of necessity be unique. 

— What then is one to do, if the matter be really 
thus? Perhaps you know better than I. All I see 
is that very few of us would have time to examine 
all the various sects of philosophy in turn, even if 
we began in early life. I know not how it is ; but 
though you seem to me to speak reasonably, yet (I 
must confess it) you have distressed me not a little 
by this exact exposition of yours. I was unluck\^ in 
coming out to-day, and in my falling in with you, 
who have thrown me into utter perplexity by your 
proof that the discovery of truth is impossible, just 



372 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

as I seemed to be on the point of attaining my 
hope. 

— Blame your parents, my child, not me! Or 
rather, blame mother Nature herself, for giving us 
but seventy or eighty years instead of making us as 
long-lived as Tithonus. For my part, I have but 
led you from premise to conclusion. 

— Nay ! you are a mocker ! I know not where- 
fore, but you have a grudge against philosophy ; 
and it is your entertainment to make a jest of her 
lovers. 

— Ah ! Hermotimus ! what the Truth may be, you 
philosophers may be able to tell better than I. But 
so much at least I know of her, that she is one by 
no means pleasant to those who hear her speak : in 
the matter of pleasantness, she is far surpassed by 
Falsehood : and Falsehood has the pleasanter coun- 
tenance. She, nevertheless, being conscious of no 
alloy within, discourses with boldness to all men, 
who therefore have little love for her. See how angry 
you are now because I have stated the truth about 
certain things of which we are both alike enamored 
— that they are hard to come by. It is as if you had 
fallen in love with a statue and hoped to win its 
favor, thinking it a human creature ; and I, under- 
standing it to be but an image of brass or stone, 
had shown you, as a friend, that your love was im- 
possible, and thereupon you had conceived that 1 
bore you some ill-will. 

— But still, does it not follow from what you said, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 373 

that we must renounce philosopli y and pass our days 
in idleness ? 

— When did you hear rae say that? I did but 
assert that if we are to seek after philosophy, whereas 
there are many ways professing to lead thereto, we 
must with much exactness distinguish them. 

—Well, Lucian ! that we must go to all the schools 
in turn, and test what they say, if we are to choose 
the right one, is perhaps reasonable ; but surely ridic- 
ulous, unless we are to live as many years as the 
Phoenix, to be so lengthy in the trial of each ; as if 
it were not possible to learn the whole by the part! 
They say that Pheidias, when he was show^n one of 
the talons of a lion, computed the stature and age 
of the animal it belonged to, modeling a complete 
lion upon the standard of a single part of it. You 
too would recognize a human hand were the rest of 
the body concealed. Even so with the schools of 
philosophy : — the leading doctrines of each might be 
learned in an afternoon. That over-exactness of 
yours, which requires so long a time, is by no means 
necessary for making the better choice. 

— You are forcible, Hermotimus ! with this theory 
of The Whole hy the Part. Yet, methinks, I heard 
you but now propound the contrary. But tell me ; 
would Pheidias when he saw the lion's talon have 
known that it was a lion's, if he had never seen the 
animal ? Surely, the cause of his recognizing the 
part was his knowledge of the whole. There is a 
way of choosing one's philosophy even less trouble- 
some than yours. Put the names of all the philos- 



374 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

ophers into an urn. Then call a little child, and let 
him dra\Y the name of the philosopher you shall follow 
all the rest of your days* 

— Nay ! be serious with me. Tell me ; did you 
ever buy wine ? 

— Surely. 

— And did you first go the whole round of the 
wine-merchants, tasting and comparing their wines ? 

— B}^ no means. 

— No ! You were contented to order the first good 
wine vou found at vour price. Bv tastino- a little 
you ascertained the qualit}" of the whole cask. How 
if you had gone to each of the merchants in turn, and 
said, ' I wish to bu}^ a cotyle of wine. Let me drink 
out the whole cask. Then I shall be able to tell 
which is best, and where I ought to buy.' Yet 
this is what you would do with the philosophies. 
Why drain the cask when you might taste, and see? 

— How slippery you are ; how you escape from 
one's fingers I Still, you have given me an advant- 
age, and are in your own trap. 

— How so ? 

— Thus ! You take a common object known to 
; every one, and make wine the figure of a thing 
which presents the greatest variety in itself, and 
about which all men are at variance, because it is an 
unseen and difficult thing. I hardlv know wherein 
philosophy and wine are alike unless it be in this, 
that the philosophers exchange their ware for money 
like the wine-merchants ; some of them with a mix- 
ture of water or worse, or giving short measure. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 375 

However, let us consider your parallel. The wine 
in the cask, you say, is of one kind throughout. But 
have the philosophers — has your own master even — 
but one and the same thing onlv to tell you, every 
day and all days, on a subject so manifold^ Other- 
wise, how can you know^ the whole by the tasting 
of one part? The whole is not the same — Ah ! and 
it may be that God has hidden the good wine of 
philosophy at the bottom of the cask. You must 
drain it to the end if you are to find those drops of 
divine sweetness you seem so much to thirst fori 
Yourself, after drinking so deeply, are still but at 
the beginning, as you said. But is not philosophy 
rather like this ? Keep the figure of the merchant 
and the cask: but let it be filled^ not with wine, 
but with ever}^ sort of grain. You come to buy. 
The merchant hands you a little of the wheat which 
lies at the top. Could you tell by looking at that, 
whether the chick-peas were clean, the lentils tender? 
the beans full ? And then, whereas in selecting our 
wine we risk only our money ; in selecting our phil- 
osophy we risk ourselves, as you told me — might 
ourselves sink into the dregs of 'the vulgar herd.' 
Moreover, while you may not drain the whole cask 
of wine by way of tasting. Wisdom arrows no less by 
the depth of your drinking. Nay ! if you take of 
her, she is increased thereby. 

And then there is another similitude I have to 
propose, as regards this tasting of philosophy. 
Don't think that I blaspheme her if I say that it 
may be las with some deadlv poison, hemlock or 



376 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

aconite. These too, though they cause death, yet 
kill not if one tastes but a minute portion. You 
would suppose that the tiniest particle must be suf 
ficient. 

— Be it as you will, Lucian ! One must live a 
hundred vears — one must sustain all this labor — 
otherwise, philosophy is unattainable. 

— Not so ! Though there were nothing strange in 
that ; if it be true, as you said at first, that Zife is 
short and art is long. But now, you take it hard 
that we are not to see you this very day, before the 
sun goes down, a Chrysippus, a Pythagoras, a 
Plato. 

— You overtake me, Lucian ! and drive me into a 
corner ; I believe, in jealousy of heart, because I have 
made some progress in doctrine whereas you have 
neglected yourself. 

— Well! Don't attend to me! Treat me as a 
Corybant, a fanatic : and do you go forward on this 
road of yours. Finish the journey in accordance 
with the view you had of these matters at the be- 
ginning of it. Only, be assured that my judgment 
on it will remain unchanged. Reason still says, that 
without criticism, without a clear, exact, unbiassed 
intelligence to try them, all those theories — all things 
. — will have been seen in vain. * To that end,' she 
tells us, ' much time is necessary, many delays of 
judgment, a cautious gait, repeated inspection.' 
And we are not to regard the outward appearance, 
or the reputation of wisdom, in any of the speakers ; 
but like the judges of Areopagus, who try their 



MARTUS THE EPirUREAN. 377 

causes in the darkness of the niglit, look only to wiuit 
they say. 

— Philosophy, then, is impossible, or possible only 
in another life ! 

— Hermotimus ! 1 grieve to tell you that all that 
even may be found insufficient. After all, we may 
deceive ourselves in the belief that we liave found 
something : — like the fishermen ! Again and again 
they let down the net. At last they feel something 
heavy, and with vast labor draw up, not a load of 
fish, but only a pot full of sand, or a great stone. 

— I don't understand what you mean by the net. 
It is plain that you have caught me in it. 

— Try to get out ! You can swim as well as 
another. We may go to all philosophers in turn 
and make trial of them. Still, I for my part, hold 
it by no means certain that an}^ one of them really 
possesses what we seek. The truth mav be a tiling 
that not one of them has found. You have twenty 
beans in your hand, and you bid ten persons guess 
how many : one says five, another fifteen ; it is pos- 
sible that one of them may tell the true number ; but it 
is not impossible that all may be wrong. So it is 
with the philosophers. All alike are in search of 
Happiness — what kind of thing it is. One says one 
thing, one another : it is pleasure ; it is virtue ; — what 
not? And Happiness may indeed be one of those 
things. But it is possible also that it may be still 
something else, different and distinct from them all. 

— What is that? — There is something, I know not 
how, very sad and disheartening in what you say. 



378 MARIU8 THE EPICUREAN. 

We seem to lia'>e come roiuul in a circle to the spot 
whence we stai-ted, and to our first incertitude. Ah ! 
Lucian, what have you done to me? You have 
proved my priceless pearl to be but ashes, and all 
my past labor to have been in vain. 

— Reflect, mv friend, that vou are not the first 
person who has tlius failed of the good thing he 
hoped for. All philosophers, so to speak, are but 
fio^htino: about the 'ass's shadow.' To me vou 
seem like one who should weep, and reproach for- 
tune because he is not able to climb up into heaven, 
or go down into the sea by Sicily and come up at 
Cyprus, or sail on wings in one day from Greece to 
India. And the true cause of his trouble is that he 
has based his hope on what he has seen in a dream, 
or his own fancy has put together ; without previous 
thought whether what he desires is in itself attain- 
able and within the compass of human nature. Even 
so, methinks, has it happened with you. As you 
dreamed, so largely, of those wonderful things, came 
Heason, and woke j^ou up from sleep, a little roughly : 
and then you are angry with Eeason, your eyes 
being still but half open, and find it hard to shake 
off sleep for the pleasure of what you saw therein. 
Only, don't be angry with me, because, as a friend, 
I would not suffer you to pass your life in a dream, 
pleasant perhaps, but still only a dream — because I 
wake you up and demand that you should busy your- 
self with the proper business of life, and send you to 
it possessed of common sense. What your soul was 
full of just now is nob very different from those 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. - 379 

Gorgons and Chimaeras and the like, which the poets 
and the painters construct for us, fancy-free : — things 
which never were, and never will be, though many 
believe in them, and all like to see and hear of them, 
just because they are so strange and odd. 

And you too, methinks, having heard from some 
such maker of marvels of a certain woman of a fair- 
ness beyond nature — beyond the Graces, beyond 
Yenus Urania herself — asked not if he spoke truth, 
and whether this woman be really alive in the world, 
but straightway fell in love with her; as they say 
that Medea was enamored of Jason in a dream. 
And whnt more than anything else seduced you into 
that passion, and others like yoa, for a vain idol of 
the fancy, is, that he who told you about that fair 
v;oman, from the verv moment when vou first be 
li'3ved that what he said was true, brought forward 
all the rest in consequent order. Upon her alone 
your eves were fixed ; bv her he led vou alone:, 
when once you had given him a hold upon you — led 
v'ou along the straight road, as he said, to the be- 
loved one. x\ll was easy after that. None of \^ou 
asked again whether it was the true way ; following 
one after another, like sheep led by the green bough 
in the hand of the shepherd. He moved you hither 
and thither with his finger, as easily as water spilt 
on a table ! 

My friend ! Be not so lengthy in preparing the 
banquet, lest you die of hunger ! I saw one who 
poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all 
his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a 



380 MARIUS THE EPICUREA^^ 

thing useful and necessary : but it remained water 
only, none the less.'' 

Just there the conversation broke off, suddenly, and 
the disputants parted. The horses had been brought 
for Lucian. The boy went home, and Marius on- 
ward, to visit a friend whose abode lay further. As 
he returned to Rome towards evening the melan- 
choly aspect, natural to a city of the dead, had tri- 
umphed over the superficial gaudiness of the early 
day. He could almost have fancied Canidia there, 
picking her way among the rickety lamps, to rifle 
some ruined or neglected tomb ; for these tombs 
were not all equally well cared for {Post mortem 
nescio I) and it had been one of the ])ieties of Aure- 
lius to frame a very severe law to prevent the defac- 
ing of the ancient monuments of the dead. There 
seemed to Marius to be some new meaning in that 
terror of isolation, of being left alone in these places 
of which the sepulchral inscriptions were so full. A 
blood-red sunset was dvino* ano^rilv, and its wild 
glare upon the shadowy objects about him concurred 
with his own fancyj in weaving all the associations 
of this famous way and its deeply graven marks of 
immemorial travel (together with all the associations 
of the morning's enthusiastic conference on the true 
way of that other sort of traveling) around a ver}'' 
melancholy image, almost ghastly in the traces of 
its great sorrows — bearing along forever, on bleed- 
ing feet, the instrument of its punishment — which 
was all Marius could recall distinctly of a certain 
Christian legend he had heard* It was the legend. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 381 

however, of an encounter upon this very spot, of 
two wayfarers on the Appian Way, as also upon 
some very dimly discerned mental journey, alto- 
gether different from himself and his late companions 
— an encounter between Love, literally fainting by 
the road, and Love " traveling in the greatness of 
his strength," Love itself, suddenly appearing to sus- 
tain that other. It was a strano^e contrast to anv- 
thing actually presented in that morning's conversa- 
tion, vet somehow seemed to recall its verv words — 
" Do they never come down again (he seemed to 
hear once more that well-modulated voice), Do they 
never come down again from the heights, to help 
those whom they left here below ? " — " And we too 
desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of all. Unless 
we find him, we shall think we have failed." 



CHAPTER XXV. 



SUNT LACRIMJi: REEIJM. 



It had become a habit with Marius — one of his 
modernisms — developed by his assistance at those 
•' conversations" of Aurelius with himself, to keep a 
register of the movements of his own private thoughts 
or humors ; not continuously indeed, but sometimes 
for lengthy intervals, during which it was no idle 
self-indulgence, but a necessity of his intellectual life, 
to " confess himself," with an intimacy, seemingly 
rare among the ancients ; ancient writers, at all 
events, having been jealous, for the most part, of 
affording us so much as a glimpse of that interior self, 
which in many cases would have actually doubled the 
interest of their objective informations. 

" If a particular tutelary or genius,^^ writes Marius, 
" according to old belief, walks beside each one of us 
through life, mine is certainly a capricious creature ! 
He fills one with wayward, unaccountable, yet quite 
irresistible humors, and seems always to be in col- 
lusion with some outward circumstance, often trivial 
enough in itself — the condition of the weather, for- 
sooth ! — the people one meets by chance — the things 

one happens to overbear them sav (veritable ivod'oi 
383 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. J>S3 

^0/x^oAot, or omens b}^ the wayside, as the old Greeks 
fancied), to push on the unreasonable prepossessions 
of the moment into weighty motives. It was doubt- 
less a quite explicable, physical fatigue w^hich pre- 
sented me to myself, on awaking this morning so 
lack-luster and trite. But I must needs take my 
petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed morn- 
ing hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite, 
of a decay in the very capacity of enjoyment. We 
need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible 
ideal w^jich may shape vague hope, and transform it 
into effective desire, to carry us year after year, with- 
out disgust, through tlie routine- work which is so 
large a part of life. 

"Then, how if appetite, be it for real or ideal, 
should itself fail one after awiiile ? Ah, yes ! it is of 
cold always that men die ; and on some of us it creeps 
very gradually. In truth, I can remember just such 
a lack-luster condition of feeling once or twice before. 
But I note, that it was accompanied then by an odd 
indifference, as the thought of them occurred to me, 
in regard to the sufferings of others — a kind of 
callousness, so unusual with me, as at once to mark 
the humor it accompanied as a palpablv morbid 
one, which would not last. Were those sufferings, 
great or little, I asked myself then, of more real con- 
sequence to them than mine to me, as I remind my- 
self that ' nothing that will end is really long ' — long 
enough to be thought of importance ? But to-day, 
my own sense of fatigue, the pity T conceive for my- 
self, disposed me strongly to a tenderness for others 



384 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

For a moment the whole world seemed to present 
itself as a hospital of sick persons ; many of them 
sick in mind ; and all of whom it would be a brutality 
not to humor. 

" Why, when I went out to walk off my wayward 
fancies, did I confront the very sort of incident (my 
unfortunate genius had surely beckoned it from afar 
to vex me) likely to irritate it further ? A party of 
men were coming down the street. They were lead- 
ing a fine race-horse ; a handsome beast, but badly 
hurt somewhere, in the circus, and useless. They 
were taking him to slaughter ; and I think the animal 
knew it : he cast such looks, as if of mad appeal, to 
those who passed him, as he went to die in his beaut}' 
and pride, for just that one mischance or fault, among 
the strangers to whom his old owner had deserted 
him ; although the morning air was still so animating, 
and pleasant to snuff. I could have fancied a soul in 
the creature, swelling against its luck. And I had 
come across the incident just when it would figure 
to me as the very symbol of our poor humanit}^ in 
its capacities for pain, its wretched accidents, its 
imperfect sympathies, which can never quite identify 
us with each other ; the very power of utterance 
and appeal seeming to fail, in proportion as our 
sorrows come home to ourselves, are really our own. 
We are constructed for suffering ! What proofs of 
it does but one da}^ afford, if we care to note them, 
as we go — a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mys- 
teries ! /Sunt lacrimoe rerum et mentem niortalia 
tangunt 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 385 

** Men's fortunes touch us ! The little children of 
one of those institutions for the support of orphans, 
now become fashionable among us as memorials of 
eminent people deceased, are going, in long file, along 
the street, on their way to a holiday in the country. 
They halt, and count themselves with an air of 
triumph, to show that they are all there. Their gay 
chatter has disturbed a little group of peasants ; a 
young woman and her husband, who have brought 
the old mother, now past work and witless, to place 
her in a house provided for such afflicted persons. 
They are fairly affectionate, but anxious how the 
thing they have to do may go — hope only that she 
may permit them to leave her there quietly behind 
them. And the poor old soul is excited by the noise 
made by the children, and partly aware of what is 
going to hap]:>en with her. She too begins to count 
— one, two, three, five — on her trembling fingers, 
misshapen by a life of toil. ' Yes ! yes ! and twice 
five make ten ' — they say, to pacify her. It is her 
last appeal to be taken home again ; her proof that 
all is not yet up with her ; that she is, at all events, 
still as capable as those joyous children. 

" At the baths, a party of laborers are at work 
upon one of the great brick furnaces, in a cloud of 
black dust. A frail young child has brought food 
for one of them, and sits apart, waiting till his father 
comes — watching the labor, but with a painful dis- 
taste for the din and dirt. He is regarding wistfully 
his own place in the world, prepared there before 
him. His mind, as he watches, is grown-up for a 



386 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

moment ; and he foresees, as it were, in that moment, 
all the long tale of days, of early awakings, of his 
own coming life of drudgery at work like this. 

" A man comes along carrying a boy whose rough 
work has already begun — the only child, whose pres- 
ence beside him sweetened his toil a little. The boy 
has been badly injured by a fall of brick- work, yet 
rides boldly with an effort, on his father's shoulders. 
It will be the way of natural affection to keep him 
alive as long as possible, though with that miserably 
shattered body — " Ah ! with us still, and feeling our 
care beside him ! ' — and yet sureh^ not without a 
heartbreaking sigh of relief, alike from him and 
them, when the end comes. 

" On the alert for incidents like these, yet of ne- 
cessity passing them by on the other side, I find it 
hard to get rid of a sense that I, for one, have failed 
in love. I could yield to the humor till I seemed to 
have had my share in those great public cruelties, 
those shocking legal crimes, like the cold-blooded 
slaughter, according to law, of the four hundred 
slaves one by one, under Nero, because one of their 
number was thought to have murdered his master. 
All that, together with the kind of facile apologies 
which those who had no share in the deed may have 
made for it, as they went about quietly on their 
own affairs that day, seems to come very close to 
me, as I think over it. And to how many of those 
now actually around me, whose life is a soi-e one, 
must I be indifferent, if T ever perceive the soreness 
at all ? To some, perhaps, the circumstances of my 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 387 

own life may cause me necessarily to be opposed, 
retjardinof those interests which actually determine 
the happiness of theirs. I would that a stronger 
love miofht arise in niv heart I 

"Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. 
My patron, the Stoic emperor, has even made it 
fashionable. To celebrate one of his brief returns 
to Rome from the war latelv, over and above a 
largess of gold pieces to all who would, the public 
debts were forgiven. He made a nice show of it: 
for once, the Romans entertained themselves with 
a good-natured spectacle, and the whole town came 
to see the great bonfire in the Forum, into which 
all bonds and evidence of debt were thrown on 
delivery, by the emperor himself ; many private 
creditors following his example. That was done 
well enough ! Only, what I feel is, that no charity 
at all can get at a certain natural unkindness which 
I find in things themselves. 

" When I first came to Rome, eager to observe 
its religion, especially its antiquities of religious 
usage, I assisted at the most curious, perhaps, of 
them all, and the most deeply mai'ked with that 
immobility which is a sort of ideal in the Roman 
religion. The ceremony took place at a singular 
spot some miles distant from the city, among the 
low hills on the bank of the Tiber, beyond the Au- 
relian Gate. There, in a little wood of venei'able 
trees, piously allowed to have their own way, age 
after age — ilex and cypress remaining where they 
fell at last, one over the other, and all caught, in 



388 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

that early May-time, under a riotous tangle of wild 
clematis —was to be found a magnificent sanctuary, 
in which the members of the Arval College assembled 
themselves on certain days. The axe never touched 
those trees — JS'ay ! it was forbidden to introduce 
any iron thing whatsoever within the precincts ; 
not only because the deities of those quiet places 
hate to be disturbed by the noise of iron, but also in 
memory of that better age — the lost Golden Age — 
the homely age of the potters, of which the central 
act of the festival was a commemoration. 

" The preliminary ceremonies were long and com- 
plicated, but of a character familiar enough. What 
was peculiar to the time and place was the solemn 
exposition, after lavation of hands, processions back- 
wards and forwards, and certain changes of vest- 
ments, of the identical earthen vessels (veritable 
relics of the old religion of IS'uma) out of which 
the holy ISTuma himself had eaten and drunk, 
exposed above a kind of altar, amid a cloud of 
flowers and incense, and many lights, to the vener- 
ation of the credulous or the faithful. 

" They were vases or cups of burnt clay, rude in 
form : and the religious veneration thus offered to 
them expressed the desire to give honor to a simpler 
age, before iron had found place in human life — the 
persuasion that that age was worth remembering, 
and a hope that it might come again. 

*' That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, 
has been the hope or the dream of some, in ever}* 
age. Yet if he did come back, or any equivalent of 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 3S9 

his presence, he could but alleviate, and by no 
means wholly remove, that root of evil, certainly 
of sorrow, of outraged human sense, in things, wliich 
one must carefully distinguish from all preventible 
accidents. Death,' and the little perpetual daily 
dyings, which have something of its sting, he must 
necessarily leave untouched. And, methinks, that 
were all the rest of man's life framed entirely to 
his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden 
himself, over the fate— say, of the flowers! For 
there is (has come to be since Kuma lived per- 
haps) a capacity for sorrow in his heart, wdiich grows 
w4th all the growth, alike of the individual and of 
the race, in intellectual delicacy and power, and 
which will find its aliment. 

'' Of that sort of golden age, indeed, one discerns 
even now a trace, here and there. Often have I 
maintained that, in this generous southern country 
at least. Epicureanism is the special philosophy of 
the poor. How little I myself really need, when 
people leave me alone, with the intellectual powers 
at work serenely. The drops of falling water, a 
few wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, even 
a few tufts of half-dead leaves, changing color in 
the quiet of a room that has but light and shadow 
in it; these, for a susceptible mind, might well do 
duty for all the glory of Augustus. 1 notice often 
the"^ true character of the fondness of the roughest 
working-people for their young cliildren, a delicate 
appreciation, not only of their serviceable affection, 
but of their visible graces : and indeed, in this 



390 MARTUS THE EPICUREAN. 

country, the children are almost always worth look- 
ing at, I see daily, in line weather, a child like a 
delicate nosegay, run to meet the rudest of brick- 
makers as he comes from work. Slie is not at all 
afraid to hang upon his rough hand ; and through 
her, he reaches out to, he makes his own, something 
out of that great world, so distant from him yet so 
real, of humanity's relinements. What is of finer 
soul, or of liner stuff, in things, and demands 
delicate touching — the delicacy of the little child 
represents to him that, initiates him into that. 
There, surely, is a touch of the secular gold, of a per- 
petual age of gold. But then again, think for a 
moment, with what a hard humor at the nature of 
things, his struggle for bare life will go on, if the 
child should happen to die. I saw to-day, under 
one of the archways of the baths, two children very 
seriously at play — a fair girl and a perfectly crip- 
pled younger brother. Two to}^ chairs and a little 
table, and sprigs of fir set upright in the sand 
for a garden ! They were playing at housekeeping. 
Well ! the girl thinks her life a perfectly good thing 
in the love of this crippled brother. But she will 
have a jealous lover in time ; and the boy, though 
his face is not altogether unpleasant, is after all a 
hopeless cripyle. 

" For there is a certain grief in things as they are, 
in man as he has come to be, as he certainly is, over 
and above those griefs of circumstance which are in 
a measure removable — an inexplicable shortcoming, 
or misadventure, on the part of nature itsel f — death, 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 391 

and old age as it must needs be, and that watching 
of their approach, which makes every stage of life 
like a dying over and over again. Almost all death 
is painful, and in every thing that comes to an end a 
touch of death, and therefore of a wretched coldness 
struck home to one, of remorse, of loss and parting, 
of outraged attachments. Given faultless men and 
women, given a perfect state of society which should 
have no need to practise on men's susceptibilities for 
its own selfish ends, adding one turn more to the 
wheel of the great rack for its own interest or 
amusement, there would still be this evil in the 
world, of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, 
felt, just in proportion to the moral, the nervous 
perfection men have reached. And what is needed 
in the world, over against that, is a certain general, 
permanent force of compassion — humanity's stand- 
ing self-pity — as an elementary ingredient of our 
social atmosphere, if we are to live in it at all. I 
wonder, sometimes, how man has cajoled himself 
into the bearing of his burden so far, seeing how 
every step his labor has won for him, from age to 
age, in the capacity of apprehension, must needs in- 
crease his dejection ; as if the increase of knowledge 
were but the revelation of the radical hopelessness 
of his position : and I would that there were one 
even as I, behind this vain show of things ! 

" At all events, the actual conditions of our life 
being as they are, and the capacity for suffering so 
large a principle in things, and the only principle, 
always safe, a sympathy with the pain one actually 



392 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

sees, it follows that the constituent practical differ- 
ence between men will be their capacity for a trained 
insight into those conditions, their capacity for sym« 
pathy ; and the future with those who have most of 
it. And for the present, those who have much of it, 
have (I tell myself) something to hold by, even in 
the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of 
self, which is, for every one, no less than the dissolu- 
tion of the world it represents for him. Nearly all 
of us, I suppose, have had our moments, in which 
any effective sympathy for us has seemed impossible, 
and our pain in life a mere stupid outrage upon us, 
like some overwhelming physical violence ; and we 
could seek refuge from it, at best, only in a mere 
general sense of goodwill, somewhere perhaps. And 
then, to one's surprise, the discovery of that good- 
will, if it were only in a not unfriendly animal, may 
seem to have explained, and actually justified, the 
existence of our pain at all. Certainly, there have 
been occasions when I have felt that if others cared 
for me as I did for them, it would be, not so much a 
solace of loss, as an equivalent for it — a certain real 
thing in itself — a touching of that absolute ground 
among all the changes of phenomena, such as our 
philosophers of late have professed themselves quite 
unable to find. In the mere clinging of human 
creatures to each other, nay ! in one's own solitary 
self-pity, even amidst what might seem absolute loss, 
I seem to touch the eternal. A certain very real 
new thing is evolved in that pitiful contact, which, 
pn a review of all the perplexity of life, satisfies thei 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 393 

moral sense, and removes that appearance of unkind- 
ness in the soul of things themselves, and assures us 
that not everything has been in vain. 

" And I know not how, but in the thought thus 
suggested, I seem to take up, and re-knit mvself to, 
a well- remembered hour, when by some gracious 
accident (it was on a journey), all things about me 
fell into a more perfect harmony than is their wont. 
For a moment, all things seemed to be, after all, 
almost for the best. Through the train of my 
thoughts, one against another, it was as if I felt the 
dominance of a person in controversy — a wrestler — 
with me. Just now, I seem to be at the point where 
I left off then. My antagonist has closed with me 
again. A protest comes, out of the very depth and 
dust of man's radically hopeless position in the world, 
with the energy of one of those suffering yet pre- 
vailing deities, of which old poetry tells. Dared 
one hope that there is a heart, even as ours, in that 
divine Assistant of one's thoughts — a heart even as 
mine, behind this vain show of things ' " 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

AH ! VOILA LES AMES QU'lL FALLOIT A LA MIENNE I 

Ro^isseau. 

The charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections^ 
wonderfully fresh in that threadbare world, would 
have led Marius, if nothing else had done so, again 
and again, to Cecilia's house. He found a range of 
intellectual pleasures, altogether new to him, in the 
sympathy of that pure and elevated soul. Elevation 
of soul, generosity, humanity — little by little it came 
to seem to him as if these existed nowhere else. 
The sentiment of maternity, above all, as he under- 
stood it there, seemed to reinforce, as with tne 
sanction of some divine pattern of it higher still, the 
claims of that, and of all natural feeling everywhere, 
down even to the sheep bleating on the hills, najM 
even to the mother- wolf, in her hungry cave. He 
saw its true place in the world .given at last, to the 
bare capacity for suffering in any creature, however 
feeble or seemingly useless. In this chivalry, this 
anxious fidelity to what could not help itself, or 
could hardly dare claim not to be forgotten, which 
seemed to leave the world's heroism, a mere property 

of the stage, what a contrast to the hard contempt 
394 



MARIUS THE EPlCUHEAK. <{95 

of death, ol pain, of glory even, in those discourses 
of Aurelius ! 

But if Marius thought at times that some long, 
cherished desires were here about to blossom for him, 
in the sort of home he had sometimes pictured to 
himself, and the very charm of which would lie in 
its distinction from random passions ; that in this 
woman to whom children instinctively clung, was 
the sister at least, he had always longed for; there 
were also circumstances which reminded him that a 
certain rule against second marriages, among these 
people was still of some force ; incidents, moreover, 
which warned his susceptible soul, like omens, not to 
mix together the flesh and the spirit, nor to make 
the matter of a heavenly banquet serve for earthly 
meat and drink. 

One day he found Cecilia occupied with the burial 
of one of the children of her household. It was on 
the tiny brow of such a child, as he now heard, that 
the Christian new light had first come to them — in, 
the light of mere physical life, kindling again there, 
when the child was dead, or supposed to be dead. 
The aged servant of Christ had arrived in the midst 
of their noisy grief ; and mounting to the little cham- 
ber where it lay, had returned, not long afterwards, 
with the child stirring in his arms as he descended 
the stair rapidly ; bursting open the tightly-wound 
folds of its shroud and scattering the flowers out of 
them, as life kindled again through its limbs. 

Old Koman common sense had taught people to 
occupy their thoughts as little as might be with chil- 



396 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

dren who died young. Here, to-day, in this curious 
house, all thoughts were tenderly bent on the little 
waxen figure; yet with a kind of exultation and 
joy notwithstanding the loud weeping of the mother. 
The other children, its late companions, broke 
with it, suddenly, into the place w^here its black 
bed was lying open to receive it. Pushing away the 
grim fossors^ they ranged themselves around it in 
order, and chanted that old psalm of theirs — Laudate 
pueri domimwi ! Dead children, children's graves — ■ 
Marius had been alwaj^s half aware of an old super- 
stitious fancy in his mind concerning them ; as if in 
coming near them he came near the failure of some 
lately-born hope or purpose of his own. And now, 
perusing intently the expression with which Cecilia 
bent upon all this, and returned afterwards to the 
house, he felt that he too had had to-day his funeral 
of a little child. But it had always been his policy, 
through all his pursuit of " experience," to fly in 
time from any too disturbing passion, likely to 
quicken his pulses beyond the point at w^hich the 
quiet work of life was practicable. Had he after 
all been taken unawares, so that it was no longer 
possible to fly ! At least, during the journey he took, 
by way of testing the existence of any chain about 
him, he found a certain disappointment at his heart, 
greater than he could have anticipated ; and as he 
passed over the crisp leaves, nipped off in multitudes 
by the first sudden cold of winter, he felt that the 
mental atmosphere within himself was perceptibly 
colder. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 897 

Yet it was, finall}^ a quite successful resignation 
which he achieved, on a review, after his manner, 
during that absence, of loss and gain. The image 
of Cecilia seemed already to have become like some 
matter of history or poetry, or a picture on the wall. 
And on his return to Kome there had been a rumor 
among those people of things which certainly did not 
speak of any merely tranquil loving, but hinted that 
he had come across a world, the lightest contact with 
which might make appropriate to him also the pre- 
cept that " They which have wives be as they that 
have none." 

That was brought home to him, when, in early 
spring, he ventured once more to listen to the sweet 
singing of the Eucharist. It breathed more than ever 
the spirit of a wonderful hope,— hopes more daring 
than poor, laboring humanity had ever seriously 
entertained before, though it was plain that a great 
terror had fallen. Even amid stifled sobbing, as the 
pathetic words of the psalter relieved the tension of 
their hearts, the people around him still wore upon 
their faces that habitual gleam of joy and placid satis- 
faction. They were still under the influence of an 
immense gratitude in thinking, even amid their pres- 
ent distress, of the hour of a great deliverance. As 
he followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt also 
again, like a mighty breath about him, the influence, 
the half-realized presence, of a great multitude, as if 
thronging along all those awful passages, to hear the 
sentence of its release from prison ; a company which 
represented nothing less thsiu—orbis terrarum— the 



398 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

whole company of mankind And the special note 
of the day expressed that relief — a sound new to him, 
drawn deep from some old Hebrew source, as he 
conjectured, repeated over and over again, at every 
pause and movement of the long ceremony. 

And then, in its place, by way of a sacred lection, 
in shocking contrast with the peaceful dignity of all 
around him, came the Epistle of the churches of Lyons 
and Vtenne, to " their sister," the church of Rome. 
For the " Peace " of the church had been broken — 
broken, as Marius could not but acknowledge, on the 
responsibility of the emperor Aureliiis himself, fol- 
lowing tamely, as a matter of course, the traces of his 
predecessors, and gratuitously enlisting, against the 
good as well as the evil of that great pagan world, 
the strange new heroism of which this sinsrular mes- 
sage was full ; and the greatness of which certainly 
lifted away all merely private regret, inclining one, 
at last, actually to draw sword for the oppressed, as 
if in some new order of knighthood— 

" The pains which our brethren have borne we are 
not able fully to tell, for the foe fell upon us with 
his whole strength. But the grace of God fought 
for us, set free the weak, and made ready those who, 
like pillars, were able to bear the weight. These, 
coming now into close strife wnth the foe, bore every 
kind of pang and shame. At the time of the fair 
which is held here with a vast crowd, the governor 
led forth the Martyrs as a show. Holding what w^as 
thought great but little, and that the pains of to-day 
are uot deserving to be measured against the glory 



MARHJS THE EPICUREAN. ^399 

that shall be made known, these worthy wrestlers 
went on joyful ; theii* delight and the sweet favor 
of God mingling in their faces, so that their bonds 
seemed but a goodly array, and like the golden brace- 
lets of a bride. Filled with the fragrance of Christ, 
they seemed to some to have been touched with 
earthly perfumes. 

" Vettius Epagathus, though he was very young, 
because he could not bear to see unjust judgment 
given against us, vented his anger, and sought to be 
heard for the brethren, for he was a youth of high 
place. Whereupon the governor asked him whether 
he also were a Christian. He confessed in a clear 
voice, and was added to the Martyrs. But he had 
the Paraclete within him ; as, in truth, he show^ed 
by the fulness of his love ; glorying in the defense 
of his brethren, and to give his life for theirs. 

" Then w^as fulfilled the saying of the Lord that 
the day would come, when every one that slayeth you 
will think that he doeth God service. Most madly 
did the mob, the governor and the soldiers rage 
against the handmaiden Blandina, in whom Christ 
showed that what seems mean among men is of 
price with Him. For whilst we all, and her earthly 
mistress, who was herself one of the contending 
Martyrs, were fearful lest through the weak flesh 
she should be unable to profess her faith, Blandina 
was filled with such powder that her tormentors, 
following upon each other from morning till night, 
owned that they were overcome, and had no more 
that they could do to her • admiring that she 



400 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

still breathed after her whole body was torn asun- 
der. 

•' But this blessed one, in the midst of her witness 
itself, renewed her strengtli ; and to repeat, / am 
Christ's ! was to her rest, refreshment, and relief 
from pain. As to Alexander, he neither uttered a 
groan nor any sound at all, but in his heart talked 
with God. Sanctus, the deacon, also, bearing beyond 
all measure the many pains devised by them, hoping 
that they would get something from him, did not 
even tell his name ; but to all questions answered 
only, 1 am Chrisfs ! For, this he confessed instead of 
his name, his race, and everything beside. Whence 
also a strife in torturing him arose between the gov- 
ernor and those tormentors, so that when they had 
nothing else they could do they set red-hot plates of 
brass to the most tender parts of his body. But he 
stood firm in his profession, strengthened and cooled 
by that stream of living water which flows from 
Christ. His corpse, a single wound, and that had 
wholly lost the form of man, was the measure of his 
pain. But Christ, paining in him, set forth a copy to 
the rest — that there is nothing fearful, nothing pain- 
ful, where the love of the Father overcomes. And 
as all those cruelties were made null through the 
patience of the Witnesses, they bethought them of 
other things ; among which was their imprisonment 
in a dark and most sorrowful place, where many 
were privily strangled. But though void of man's 
aid, they were filled with power from the Lord, both 
in body and mind, and strengthened the rest. Also^ 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 401 

much joy was in our virgin Mother, the church ; for, 
by means of these, those who had fallen away re- 
traced their steps — were again conceived, were filled 
again with lively heat, and hastened to make the 
confession of their faith. 

" The holy bishop Pothinus, who was now past 
ninety years old and weak in body, yet in his heat 
of soul and his longing for martyrdom, roused what 
strength be had, and was also cruelly dragged to 
judgment, and gave witness. Thereupon he suffered 
many stripes, all thinking it would be a wickedness 
if they fell short in ill-use of him, for that thus they 
would avenge their own gods. Hardly drawing 
breath, he was thrown into prison, and after two days 
there died. 

" After these things their martyrdom was parted 
into divers manners. Plaiting as it were one crown 
of many colors and all kinds of flowers, they yielded 
it to God. Maturus, therefore, Sanctus and Blan- 
dina, were led to the wild beasts. And Maturus and 
Sanctus passed through all the pains of the amphi- 
theater, as if they had suffered nothing before : or 
rather, as having in many trials overcome, and now 
contending for the prize itself, were at last dis- 
missed. 

" But Blandina was bound and hung upon a stake, 
and set forth as food for the assault of the wild 
beasts. And as she thus seemed to be hanging 
upon the Cross, by her fiery prayers she imparted 
much alacrity to those contending Witnesses. For 
as thev looked upon her with the eye of flesh, 
26' 



402 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

through her, they saw Him that was crucified. But 
as none of the beasts would then touch her, she was 
taken down from the Cross, and sent back to prison 
for another day : that, though weak and mean, yet 
clothed with the mighty Wrestler, Christ Jesus, she 
might by many conquests give heart to her brethren. 

'* On the last day, therefore, of the shows, she was 
brought forth again, together with Ponticus, a lad 
of about fifteen ^^ears old. They were brought in 
every day to behold the pains of the rest. And 
when they wavered not, the mob was full of rage ; 
pitying neither the youth of the lad, nor the sex of 
the maiden. Hence, they drave them through the 
whole round of pain. And Ponticus, taking heart 
from Blandina, having borne well the whole of those 
torments, gave up his life. Last of all, the blessed 
Blandina herself, as a mother that had given life to 
her children, and sent them like conquerors to the 
great King, hastened, with joy at the end, to them, 
as to a marriage-feast ; even the foe owning that no 
woman had ever borne pain, so manifold and great 
as hers. 

" Not even then was their anger appeased ; some 
among them seeking for us pains, if it might be, 
yet greater ; that the saying might be fulfilled. He 
that is unjust^ let him l>e unjust still. And their rage 
against the Witnesses took a new form, so that we 
were in much sorrow for lack of freedom to entrust 
their bodies to the earth. Neither did the night- 
time, nor the offer of money, avail us for this matter ; 
but they guarded them by every means, as if it were 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 408 

a great gain to hinder their burial. Therefore, after 
they had been displayed to view for many days, they 
were at length burned to ashes, and cast into the river 
Rhone, which flows by this place, that there might 
be not a vestige of them left upon the earth. For 
they said, Now shall we see whether they will rise 
again^ and whether their God can save them out of 
our hands.^^ 



CHAPTER XXYIL 

THE TRIUMPH OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 

It was not many months after the date of that 
apistle that Marius, then expecting to leave Rome 
for a long time, and in fact about to leave it forever, 
stood to witness the triumphal entry of Marcus 
Aurelius, almost at the exact spot from which he 
had w^atched the emperor^s solemn return to the 
capital on his own first coming thither. It was a 
full triumph this time — Justus Triumphus — justi- 
fied, by far more than the due amount of bloodshed 
in those I^Torthern wars, now it might seem happily 
at an end. Among the captives, amid the laughter 
of the crowds at his blowsy upper garment, his 
trousered legs and conical wolf-skin cap, walked our 
own ancestor, representative of subject Germany, 
under a figure very familiar in later Roman sculp- 
ture ; and, though certainly with none of the grace 
of the Dying Gaul^ yet with plenty of uncouth 
pathos in his misshapen features and pale, servile, 
yet angry eyes. His children, white-skinned and 
golden-haired " as angels," trudged beside him. 
His brothers, of the animal world, the ibex, the wild- 
cat, and the reindeer stalking and trumpeting 
404 



marius the epicurean. 4.05 

grandly, tound their due place in the procession ; 
and among the spoil, set fortli on a portable frame 
that it might be distinctly seen (not a mere model, 
but the very house he had lived in) a wattled cot- 
tage in all the simplicity of its snug contrivances 
against the cold, and well-calculated to give a mo- 
ment's delight to his new, sophisticated masters. 

Andrea Mantegna, working at the end of the 
fifteenth century, for a society full of antiquarian 
fervor at the sight of the earthy relics of the old 
Roman people, day by day returning to light out of 
the clay — childish still, moreover, and \vith no more 
suspicion of pasteboard than the old Romans them- 
selves, in its unabashed love of open-air pageantries, 
has invested this, the greatest, and alas I the most 
characteristic, of the splendors of imperial Rome, 
with a reality livelier than any description. The 
homely sentiments for which he has found place in 
his learned paintings are hardly more lifelike than 
the great public incidents of the show, there depicted. 
And then, with all that vivid realism, how refined, 
how dignified, how select in type, is this reflection 
of the old Roman world ! especially, in its time-mel- 
lowed red and gold, for the modern visitor to the 
old English palace. 

It was under no such selected type that the great 
procession presented itself to Marius ; though, in 
effect, he found something there, as it Avere prophetic, 
and evocative of ghosts ; as susceptible minds will do, 
in a repetition such as this, after a long interval, of 
3ome notable incident, which may yet perhaps have 



406 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

no direct concern for themselves. In truth, he hacj 
been so bent of late on certain very personal inter 
ests that the broad current of the world's doings 
seemed to have withdrawn into the distance, but 
now, in this procession, to return once more into 
evidence for him. That, at least, had been holding 
on its old way, and was all its old self, thus passing 
by dramatically, and accentuating, in this favorite 
spectacle, its mode of viewing things. And even 
without the contrast of a very different scene from 
that he would have found it, just now, a somewhat 
vulgar spectacle. The temples, wide open, with 
their ropes of roses flapping in the wind against the 
rich, reflecting marble, their startling draperies and 
heavy cloud of incense, were but the centers of a 
great banquet spread through all the gaudily coL 
ored streets of Rome, for which the carnivorous 
appetite of those who thronged them in the glare 
of the mid-day sun was frankly enough asserted. 
At best, they were but calling their gods to share 
with them the cooked, sacrificial, and other meats, 
reeking to the sky. The child, who was concerned 
for the sorrow^s of one of those Korthern cap- 
tives as he passed by, and explained to his com 
rade — " There's feeling in that hand, you know ! " 
benumbed and lifeless as it looked in the chain, 
seemed, in a moment, to turn the whole show into 
its own proper tinsel. Yes ! these Eomans were i» 
coarse, a vulgar people ; and their vulgarity in lul) 
evidence here. And Aurelius himself seemed to 
have undergone the world's coinage, and fallen to 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 407 

the level of his reward, in a mediocrity no longer 
golden. 

Yet if, as he passed by (almost filling the quaint 
old circular chariot with his magnificent attire, flow- 
ered with gold) he presented himself to Marius, 
chiefly as one who had made the great mistake ; to 
the multitude he came as a more than magnanimous 
conqueror. That he had " forgiven " the innocent 
wife and children of the dashing and almost success- 
ful rebel Avidius Cassius, now no more, was a recent 
circumstance still in memory. As the children went 
past, not among those who would presently be 
detached from the great progress for execution, ere 
the emperor on his knees ascended the steps of the 
Capitol, but happ3^ and radiant, as adopted members 
of the imperial family, the crowd actually enjoyed 
a moral exhibition, which might become the fashion. 
And it was in concession to some possible touch of a 
heroism, that had really cost him something, in all 
this, that Marius resolved to seek the emperor once 
more, with an appeal for common sense, for reason 
and justice. 

He had set out at last to revisit his old home ; and 
knowing that Aurelius was then in retreat at the 
villa of Lorium, which lay almost on his way thither, 
determined there* to present himself. Although the 
great plain was steadily dying, a new race of wild 
birds establishing itself there, as he knew enough of 
their habits to understand, and the idle contadino 
with his never-ending ditty always of decay and death, 
replacing the lubty liouian laborer, pever had this 



4:08 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

poetic country between Eome and the sea impressed 
him more than on the sunless day of early autumn, 
under which all tliat fell within the immense horizon 
was presented in one uniform tone of a clear, peniten- 
tial blue. Stimulating to the fancy as was that range 
of low hills to the northwards, already troubled with 
the upbreaking of the Apennines, yet the want of 
quiet in their outline, with a multitude of wild jaggs 
and sudden upheavals, marked them as but the ruins 
of nature ; while at all the little ascents and descents 
of the road might be noted traces of the abandoned 
work of man. At intervals, the way w^as still redo- 
lent of the floral relics of summer, daphne and myr- 
tle blossom, in 'the little, sheltered hollows and ra- 
vines. At last amid rocks here and there piercing the 
soil, as those descents became steeper, and the main 
line of the Apennines, now visible, gave a higher ac- 
cent to the scene, he espied over \X\q jpilateau^ almost 
like one of those broken hills, cutting the horizon to- 
wards the sea, the old brown villa itself — favorite 
retreat of one after another of the family of the An- 
tonines. As he approached it, reminiscences crowded 
upon him, above all of that old life there of Anto- 
ninus Pius, in its mansuetude and calm. It was here 
that his last moment had come, just as the tribune 
of the watch had received from his lips the word 
JEquanimitas ! as the watchword of the night. To 
see their emperor living there like one of his simplest 
subjects, his hands red at vintage-time with the juice 
of the grapes, hunting, teaching his children, starting 
betimes for long days, with all who cared to join, in 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 409 

antiquarian researches in the country around — all 
this had seemed to mean the peace of mankind. 

Upon that had come (like a stain, it seemed to him 
just then) the more intimate life of Faustina. Surely, 
that marvelous but malign beauty must still haunt 
those rooms, like an unquiet, dead goddess, who 
might have perhaps, after all, something reassuring 
to tell surviving mortals about her ambiguous self. 
When the news had come to Rome, two years before, 
that those eyes, always so persistently turned to van- 
ity, had suddenly closed forever, a strong desire to 
pray had come over Marius, as he followed in fancy 
on its wild way the soul of one he had spoken with 
now and again, and whose presence in it for a time 
the world of art could so ill have spared. Certainly 
ttie honors freely accorded to embalm her memory 
were poetic enough — the rich temple left among 
those wild villagers at the spot, now it was hoped 
sacred forever, where she had breathed her last ; 
the golden image, in her old place at the amphi- 
theater ; the altar at which the newly married might 
make their sacrifice ; above all, the great founda- 
tion for orphan girls, to be called after her name. 

It was precisely on account of that, that Marius 
failed to see Aurelius again, and make the chivalrous 
effort at enlightenment he had proposed to himself. 
Entering the villa, he learned from an usher, at the 
closed door of the long gallery (famous in the mem- 
ory of many a visitor, for its prospects) which led to 
the imperial apartments, that the emperor was al- 
ready in audience : Marius must await his turn — he 



410 MAflltTS THE EPICUREAN, 

knew not how long it might be. An odd audience it 
seemed ; for at that moment, through the closed door 
came shouts of laughter, the laughter of a great 
crowd of children (the " Faustinian Children " them- 
selves, as he afterwards learned) happy and at their 
ease, in the imperial presence. It was the vague- 
ness of the time for which so pleasant a reception 
might last, so pleasant that he would hardly have 
wished to shorten it, which made Marius finallv de- 
termine to proceed, it being necessary that he should 
accomplish the first stage of his journey on that day 
The thing was not to be — Yale ! anima infeUcis- 
sima ! — and he might at least carry away that sound 
of the laughing orphan children, as a not unamiable 
last impression of kings and their houses. 

The place he was now about to visit, as the rest- 
ing-place of his dead especially, had never been for- 
gotten. Only, the first eager period of his life in 
Rome had slipped on rapidly ; and, almost on a 
sudden, that old time had come to seem very long 
ago. An almost burdensome solemnity had grown 
about his memory of the place, so that to revisit it 
seemed a thing that needed preparation : it was what 
he could not have done hastily. He half feared to 
lessen, or disturb, its value for himself. And now 
as he traveled leisurely towards it, and so far with 
quite tranquil mind, interested also in many another 
place by the way, he discovered a shorter road to the 
end of his journey, and found himself indeed ap- 
proaching the spot that was to him like no other. 
Dreaming now only of the dead before him, he 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 411 

journeyed on rapidiy through the night ; the thought 
ol the thing increasing on him, in the darkness. It 
was as if they had been waiting for him there all 
those years, and felt his footsteps approaching now, 
and understood his devotion, quite gratefully, in 
spite of ite^rdiness, in that lowliness of theirs. As 
morning came, his late tranquillity of mind had given 
way to a grief which surprised him by its freshness. 
He was moved more than he could have thought 
possible by so distant a sorrow. " To-day ! " — they 
seemed to be saying, as the hard dawn broke, — " To- 
da/y^ he will come ! " At last, amid all his dis- 
tractions, they had become the main purpose of what 
he was then doing. The world around it, when he 
actually reached the place later in the day, was in a 
mood very different — so work-a-day, it seemed, on 
that fine afternoon, and the villages he passed through 
so silent ; the inhabitants being for the most part, 
at their labor in the country. At last, above the 
tiled outbuildings, there were the walls of the old 
villa itself, with its tower for the pigeons ; and 
among, not cypresses, but poplar-trees with leaves 
like golden fruit, the birds floating around it, the 
conical roof of the burial-place itself. In the pres- 
ence of an old servant who remembered him, the 
great seals were broken, the rusty key turned at 
last in the lock, the door was forced out among the 
weeds grown thickly about it, and Marius was 
actually in the place which had been so often in hi? 
thoughts. 

He was shocked, with a touch of remorse howevel:, 



412 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

only by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place 
merely allowed to remain as when it was last used, 
and left in a hurry, till long years had covered all 
alike with thick dust — the faded flowers, the burnt- 
out lamps, the tools and hardened mortar of the 
workmen who had had something to do there. A 
heavy fragment of woodwork had fallen and chipped 
open one of the oldest of the mortuary urns, many 
hundreds in number, ranged around the walls. It 
was not properly an urn, but a minute coffin of stone, 
and the fracture had revealed a piteous spectacle of 
the moldering, unburned remains within ; the bones 
of a child, as he understood, which might have died, 
in a ripe age, three times over, since it slipped aw^ay 
from among his great-grandfathers, so far up in the 
line. Yet the protruding baby hand seemed to stir 
up in him feelings vivid enough, bringing him inti- 
mately within the scope of dead people's grievances. 
He noticed, side by side with the urn of his mother, 
that of a boy of about his own age— one of the serv- 
ing-boys of the household — who had descended 
hither, from the light of childhood, almost at the 
same time with her. It seemed as if this boy of his 
own age had taken filial place beside her there, in 
his stead. That hard feeling again, which had always 
lingered in his mind with the thou oh t of the father 
he had scarcely known, melted wholly away, as he 
read the precise number of his years, and reflected 
suddenly — He was of my own jpresent age ; no hard 
old man, hut with interests^ as he looked round him 
on the world for the last time, even as mine to-day ! 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 413 

And with that came a blinding rush of kindness, as 
if two alienated friends had come to understand each 
other at last. There was weakness in all this ; as 
there is in all care for dead persons, to which, how- 
ever, people will always yield in proportion as they 
really care for each other. After all, with a vain 
yearning to be able to do something for them still, 
he reflected, as he stood there, that such doing must 
be, in the nature of things, mainly^ for himself. His 
own epitaph might be that old one — trryanxs mu ISiou 
yivows — He was the last of his race 1 Of those who 
might come hither after himself probably no one 
would ever again come quite as he had done to-day : 
and it was under the influence of this thought that 
he determined to bury all that, deep below the sur- 
face, to be remembered only by himself, and in a 
way which would claim no sentiment from the in- 
different. That took many days — was like a re- 
newal of lengthy old burial rites — as he himself 
watched the work, early and late ; coming on the 
last day very early, and anticipating, b\'^ stealth, the 
last touches, while the workmen were absent: one 
young lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy 
bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness with which 
Marius flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle 
with the dark mold. 



CHAPTER XXYIII. 

ANIMA NATUKALITER CHRISTIANA. 

Those eight days at his old home, so mournfully 
occupied, had been for Marius in some sort a forcible 
disruption from the world and the roots of his life 
in it. He had been carried out of himself as never 
before ; and when the time was over, it was as if 
the claim over him of the earth below had been vin- 
dicated, over against the interests of that living 
world around him. Dead, yet sentient and caress- 
ing hands seemed to reach out of the ground and to 
be clinging about him. Looking back sometimes 
now, from about the midway of life — the age, as he 
conceived, at which one begins to re-descend one's 
life — and antedating it a little, in his sad humor, he 
would note, almost with surprise, the unbroken pla- 
cidity of the contemplation in w^hich it had been 
passed. His own temper, his early theoretic scheme 
of things, would have pushed him on to movement 
and adventure. Actually, as circumstances had de- 
termined, all its movement had been inward ; move- 
ment of observation only, or even of pure medita- 
tion ; partly, perhaps, because throughout it had 

been something of a meditatio mortis, ever facing 
414 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 415 

towards the act of final detachment. But death, ol 
com ?e, as he reflected, must be for every one nothing- 
less than that fifth or last act of a drama, and, as 
such, was likelv to have something of the stirrinor 
character of a deiiouement. And, in fact, it was in 
form tragic enough that his end not long afterwards 
came to him. 

In the midst of the extreme weariness and depres- 
sion which had followed those last days, Cornelius, 
then, as it happened, on a journe}^ and traveling near 
the place, finding traces of him, had become his 
guest at White-nights. It was just then that Marius 
felt, as he had never done before, the value to him- 
self, the overpowering charm, of his friendship. 
" More than brother! " — he felt — " like a son also ! " 
contrasting the fatigue of soul which made himself 
practically an older man, with the other's irrepres- 
sible youth. For it was still the wonderful hopeful- 
ness of Cornelius, his seeming prerogative over the 
future, which determined, and kept alive, all other 
sentiment concerning him. A new hope had sprung 
up in the world of which he, Cornelius, was a depos- 
itary, which he must bear onward in it. Identifying 
himself with Cornelius in so dear a friendsliip, 
through him, Marius seemed to touch, to ally him- 
self to, actually to possess for himself, the coming 
world ; even as happy parents reach out, and take 
possession of it, in and through the survival of their 
children. For in these days their intimacy had 
grown very close, as they moved hither and thither, 
leisurely, among the country-places thereabout. 



416 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

Cornelius being on his way back to Eome, till they 
came one evening to a little town (Marius remera- 
Dered having been there on his first journey) which 
had even then its church and le^^end — the leoend and 
holy relics of the martyr Hyacinthus, a young Eoman 
soldier, whose blood had stained the soil of this place 
in the days of the emperor Trajan. 

The thought of that so recent death, haunted 
Marius through the night, as if with audible sighs 
and crying above the restless wand, which came and 
went around their lodging. But tow^ards dawn he 
slept heavily ; and awaking in broad daylight, and 
finding Cornelius absent, set forth to seek him. 
The plague was still in the place — had indeed just 
broken out afresh ; with an outbreak also of cruel 
superstition among its wild and miserable inhabit- 
ants. Surely, the old gods were wroth at the pres- 
ence of this new enemv amono: them ! And it was 
no ordinary morning into w^hich Marius stepped 
forth. There was a menace in the dark masses of 
hill, and motionless wood, against the gray, although 
seemingly unclouded sky. Under this sunless heaven 
the earth itself seemed to fret and fume wath a heat 
of its own, in spite of the strong night-wind. And 
now the wind itself had fallen. Marius seemed to 
be breathing some strange heavy fluid, denser than 
any common air. He could have fancied that the 
world had sunken in the night, far below^ its proper 
level, into some close, thick abysm of its atmosphere. 
The Christian people of the town, hardly less terri- 
fied and overwrought by the haunting sickness about 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 417 

them than their pagan neighbors, were at prayer 
before the tomb of the martyr ; and even as Marius 
pressed among them to a place beside Cornelius, on 
a sudden the hills seemed to roll like a sea in motion, 
around the whole compass of the horizon. For a 
moment Marius supposed himself attacked with 
some sudden sickness of brain, till the fall of a great 
mass of building convinced him that not himself but 
the earth under his feet was giddy. A few moments 
later the little market-place was alive with the rush 
of the distracted inhabitants from their totterinsr 
houses ; and as they waited anxiously for the second 
shock of earthquake, a long-smoldering suspicion 
leapt precipitately into well-defined purpose, and the 
whole mass of people was carried forward towards 
the band of worshipers below. An hour later, in 
the wild tumult which followed, the earth had been 
stained afresh with the blood of the martvrs Felix 
and Faustinus — Flores apparuerunt in terra nostra ! 
— and their brethren, together with Cornelius and 
Marius, thus, as it had happened, taken among them, 
were prisoners, reserved for the action of the law. 
Marius and his friend, with certain others, exercis- 
ing the privilege of their rank, made claim to be tried 
in Rome, or at least in the chief town of the district • 
where, indeed, in the troublous days that had now 
begun, a legal process had been already instituted. 
Under the care of a military guard the captives were 
removed, the same day, one stage of their journey ; 
sleeping, for security, during the night, side by side 



2.7 



418 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

with their keepers, in the rooms of a deserted 
shepherds' house by the wayside. 

It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not 
a Christian : their guards were forward to make the 
utmost pecuniary profit of the circumstance, and 
during the night, Marius, taking advantage of the 
loose charge kept over them, and partly by a large 
bribe, had contrived that Cornelius, as the really 
innocent person, should be dismissed in safety on his 
way, to procure for him, as Marius explained, the 
proper means of defense, when the time of trials came 

And in the morning Cornelius in fact set forth 
alone, from their miserable place of detention. 
Marius believed that Cornelius was to be the husband 
of Cecilia; and that, perhaps strangely, had but 
added to the desire to get him away safely. — We 
wait for the great crisis which is to try what is in 
us : we can hardly bear the pressure of our hearts, 
as we think of it : the lonely wrestler, or victim, 
which imagination foreshadows to us, can hardly be 
oneself : it seems an outrage of our destiny that we 
should be led along so gently and imperceptibly, 
to so terrible a leaping-place in the dark, for more 
perhaps than life or death. At last, the great act, 
the critical moment, comes, easily, almost uncon- 
sciously. Another motion of the clock, and our 
fatal line — the ^' great climacteric point" — has been 
passed, which changes ourselves or our lives. In one 
quarter of an hour, under a sudden, uncontrollable 
impulse, hardly weighing what he did, almost as a 
matter of course and as lightlv as one hires a bed for 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 419 

one's night's rest on a journey, Marius had taken 
upon himself all the heavy risk of the position in 
which Cornelius had then been— the long and weari- 
some delays of judgment, which were possible ; the 
danger and wretchedness of a long journey in this 
manner ; possibly the danger of death. He had de- 
livered his brother, after the manner he had some- 
times vaguely anticipated as a kind of distinction in 
his destiny ; though indeed always with wistful cal- 
culation as to what it might cost him : and in the 
first moment after the thing was actually done, he 
felt only satisfaction at his courage, at the discovery 
of his possession of " nerve.'' 

Yet he was, as we know, no hero, no heroic martyr 
— had indeed no right to be ; and when he had seen 
Cornelius depart, and, as he believed, on his blithe 
and hopeful way, to become the husband of Cecilia ; 
actually, as it had happened, without a word of fare- 
well, supposing Marius was almost immediately after- 
wards to follow (Marius indeed having avoided the 
moment of leave-taking with its possible call for an 
explanation of the circumstances) the reaction came. 
He could only guess, of course, at what might really 
happen. So far, he had but taken upon himself, in 
the stead of Cornelius, a great personal risk. It was 
danger, not even probable death, that he faced. 
Still, for one like himself especially, with all those 
sensibilities of which his whole manner of life had 
been but an education, the situation of one under 
trial on a criminal charore was actually full of dis- 
tress. To him, in truth, a death such as the recent 



420 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

death of those saintly brothers, seemed no glorious 
end. In his case, at least, the Martyrdom, as it was 
called — the overpowering act of testimony that 
Heaven had come down among men — would be but 
a common execution : from the drops of his blood 
there would spring no miraculous, poetic flowers ; no 
eternal aroma would indicate the place of his burial ; 
no plenary grace, overflowing forever upon those 
who might stand around it. Had there been one to 
listen just then, there would have come, from the 
very depth of his desolation, an eloquent utterance 
at last, on the irony of men's fates, on the singular 
accidents of life and death. 

The guards, now safely in possession of whatever 
money and other valuables the prisoners had had on 
them, pressed them forward, over the rough mountain 
paths, altogether careless of their sufferings. The 
great autumn rains were falling. At night the sol- 
diers lighted a fire ; but it was impossible to keep 
warm. From time to time they stopped to roast 
portions of the meat they carried with them, making 
their captives sit round the fire, and pressing it upon 
them. But weariness and depression of spirits had 
deprived Marius of appetite, even if the food had 
been more attractive, and for some days he partook 
of nothing but bad bread and water. All through 
the dark mornings they dragged over boggy plains, 
and up and down hills, wet through sometimes with 
the heavy rain. Even in those deplorable circum- 
stances, he could but notice the wild, dark beauty of 
those places — the stormy sunrise, and placid spaces 



MARll'S THE EPICUREAN. 42I 

of evening. One of the keepers, a very young sol- 
dier, won him at times, by his simple kindness, to 
talk a little, with wonder at the lad's half-conscious, 
poetic delight in the adventures of the journey. 
At times, the whole company woukl lie down for 
rest at the roadside, hardly sheltered from the storm ; 
and in the deep fatigue of his spirit, his old longing 
for inopportune sleep overpowered him. — Sleep any- 
where, and under any conditions, seemed at those 
times a thing one might well offer the remnants of 
one's life for. 

It must have been about the fifth night, as he after- 
wards conjectured, that the soldiers, believing him 
likely to die, had finally left him unable to proceed 
further, under the care of some country people, who 
to the extent of their power certainly treated him 
kindly in his sickness. He awoke to consciousness 
after a severe attack of fever, lying alone on a rough 
bed, in a kind of hut. It seemed a remote, mysteri- 
ous place, as he looked around in the silence ; but so 
fresh (lying, in fact, in a high pasture-land among 
the mountains) that he felt he should recover, if only 
he might just lie there in quiet long enough. Even 
during those nights of delirium he had felt the scent 
of the new-mown hay pleasantly, with a dim sense 
for a moment that he was lying safe in his old home. 
The sunlight lay clear beyond the open door ; the 
sounds of the cattle reached him softly from the 
green places around. Recalling confusedly the tor- 
turing hurry of his late journeys, he dreaded, as his 
consciousness of the whole situation returned, the 



422 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

coming of the guards. But the place remained in 
absolute stillness. He was, in fact, at liberty, but 
for his own disabled condition. And it was cer- 
tainly a genuine clinging to life that he felt just 
then, at the very bottom of his mind. It had been 
so, obscurely, even through all the wild fancies of 
his delirium, from the moment which followed his 
decision for Cornelius, against himself. 

The occupants of the place were to be heard pres- 
ently, coming and going on their business, about 
him : and it was as if the approach of death brought 
out in all their force the merely human sentiments. 
There is that in death which certainly makes indif- 
ferent persons anxious to forget the dead — to put 
them away out of their thoughts altogether, as soon 
as possible. Conversely, in the deep isolation of 
spirit which was now creeping upon Marius, the faces 
of these people, casually visible, took a hold on his 
affections ; the link of general brotherhood, the feel- 
ing of human kinship, asserting itself most strongly 
when it was about to be severed forever. At nights 
he would find this face or that impressed deeply on 
his fancy ; and his mind would, in a troubled sort 
of manner, follow them onwards, on the w^ays of 
their simple, humdrum, everyday life, with a strange 
yearning to share it with them, envying the calm, 
earthy cheerfulness of all their days to-be, still under 
the sun (but how indifferent, of course, to him !) as 
if these rude people had been suddenly lifted into 
some height of earthly good-fortune, which must 
needs isolate them from himself. 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 423 

Tristem nemvnem fecit — he repeated to himself ; his 
old prayer shaping itself now almost as an epitaph. 
Yes ! so much the very hardest judge must concede 
to him. And the sense of satisfaction which that 
left with him disposed him to a conscious effort of 
recollection, while he lay there, unable now even to 
raise his head, as he discovered on attempting to 
reach a pitcher of water which stood near. Revela- 
tion, vision, the uncovering of a vision, the seeing of 
a perfect humanity, in a perfect world — through all 
his alternations of mind, by some dominant instinct, 
determined by the orginal necessities of his own 
nature and character, he had always set that above 
the having or even the doing^ of anything. For, 
such vision, if received with due attitude on his part 
was, in reality, the heing something, such as was 
surely a pleasant sacrifice to whatever gods there 
might be, observant of him. And how goodly had 
the vision been ! — one long unfolding of beauty and 
energy in things, upon the closing of which he might 
gratefully utter his " Yixi ! " Even then, just ere his 
eyes were to be shut forever, the things they had 
seen seemed a veritable possession in hand ; the 
persons, the places, above all, the touching image of 
Jesus, apprehended dimly through the expressive 
faces, the crying of the children, in that mysterious 
drama, with a sudden sense of peace and satisfaction 
now, which he could not explain to himself. Surely, 
he had prospered in life ! And again, as of old, the 
sense of gratitude seemed to bring with it the sense 
also of a living person at his side, 



424 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

For still in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom 
had ever been, with a sense of economy, with a 
jealous estimate of gain and loss, to use life, not as 
the means to some problematic end, but, as far as 
might be, from dying hour to dying hour, an end in 
itself — a kind of music, all-sufficing to the duly trained 
ear, even as it died out on the air. Yet now, aware 
still in that suffering body of such vivid powers of 
mind and sense, as he anticipated from time to time 
how his sickness, practically without aid as he was 
in this rude place, was likely to end, and that the 
moment of taking final account was drawing very 
near, a consciousness of waste would come, with half- 
angry tears of self-pity, in his great weakness — a 
blind, outraged, angry feeling of wasted power, such 
as he would have himself experienced standing by the 
deathbed of another, in condition similar to his own. 

And yet it was the fact, again, that the vision of 
men and things, actually revealed to him on his way 
through the world, had developed, with a wonderful 
largeness, the faculties to which it addressed itself, 
his whole general capacity of vision : and in that too 
was a success, in the view of certain, very definite, 
well-considered, undeniable possibilities. Through- 
out that elaborate and lifelong education of his re* 
ceptive powers, he had ever maintained the purpose 
of a self -preparation towards possible further revela- 
tion, some day — an ampler vision, which should take 
up into itself and explain this world's delightful 
shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till 
then but half-understood, might be taken up into the 



MAT?TT^?1 THE EPirUREAN. 4'25 

text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, 
his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily 
through all those years, from experience to experience, 
was at its height ; the house was ready for the pos- 
sible guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, 
for whatsoever divine fingers might choose to write 
there. And was not this precisely the condition, the 
attitude of mind, to which something higher than 
he, yet akin to him, would be likely to reveal itself; 
to which that influence he had felt now and again 
like a friendh'- hand upon his shoulder, amid the ac- 
tual obscurities of the world, would be likely to make 
a further explanation ? Surely, the aim of a true 
philosophy must lie, not in futile efforts towards the 
complete accommodation of man to the circumstances 
in which he chances to find himself, but in the main- 
tenance of a kind of ingenuous discontent, in the face 
of the ver}'- highest achievement; the unclouded and 
receptive soul quitting the world finally, with the same 
fresh wonder with which it had entered it still un- 
impaired, and going on its blind w^ay at last with the 
consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as 
its pledge of something further to come. Marius 
seemed to understand how one might look back upon 
life here, and its excellent visions, as but the portion 
of a race-course left behind him by a still swift run- 
ner : for a moment, he felt a curiosity and ardor, 
with dim trouble as of imminent vision, to enter upon 
a future, the possibilities of which seemed so large. 

And just then, again amid the memory of certain 
touching actual words and images, came the thought 



426 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

of the great hope, that hope against hope, which, as 
he conceived, had arisen — Lux sedentihtis in teneh'is 
— upon tlie aged world ; the hope which Cornelius 
had seemed to bear away upon him in his strength, 
with a buoyancy which had made Marius feel some- 
how, less that, by a caprice of destiny, he had been 
left to die in his place, than that Cornelius had 
ffone on a mission to deliver him also from death. 
There had been a permanent protest established in 
the world, a plea, a perpetual afterthought, which 
humanity would henceforth ever possess in reserve, 
against a wholly mechanical and disheartening the- 
ory of itself and its conditions. It was a thought 
which relieved for him the iron outline of the horizon 
about him, touchmg it as if with soft light from be- 
yond ; filling the shadowy, hollow places to which he 
was on his way with the warmth of definite afl'ec- 
tions ; and confirming also certain considerations by 
which he seemed to link himself to the generations to 
come in the world he was leaving. Yes ! through the 
survival of their children, happy parents are able to 
think calmly, and with a very practical affection, of 
a world in which they are to have no direct share ; 
planting, with a cheerful good-humor, the acorns 
they carry about with them, that their grandchildren 
maybe shaded from the sun by the broad oak-trees 
of the future. That is nature's way of easing death 
to us. It was thus too, surprised, delighted, that 
Marius, under the power of that new hope among 
men, could think of the generations to come after 
him. Without it, dim in truth as it was, he could 



MARItlS THE EPICUREAN. 42t 

hardly have dared to ponder the world whicn limited 
all he really knew, as it would be when iie snouid 
have departed from it. A strange lonesomeness, 
like a physical darkness, seemed to settle over the 
thought of it ; as if its business hereafter must be, 
as far as he was concerned, carried on in some in- 
habited, but distant and alien, star. But with the 
sense of that hope warm upon him, he seemed to 
anticipate a care for himself, never to tail even on 
earth, with a reverential care for his very body — 
the dear sister and companion of his soul, outworn, 
suffering, and in the very article of death, as it was 
now. 

For the weariness came back tenfold ; and he had 
finally to abstain from thoughts like those, as from 
what caused physical pain. And then, as before 
in the wretched, sleepless nights of those forced 
marches, he would try to fix his mind, as it were 
impassively, and like a child thinking over the toys 
it loves, one after another, that it may fall asleep 
so, and forget all about them, the sooner, on all the 
persons he had loved in life — on his love for them, 
dead or living, grateful for his love or not, rather 
than on theirs for him — letting their images pass 
away again, or rest with him, as they would. In the 
bare sense of having loved he seemed to find, even 
amid this foundering of the ship, that on which his 
soul might " assuredly rest and depend." One after 
another, he suffered those faces and voices to come 
and go, as in some mechanical exercise, as he might 
have repeated all the verses he knew bv heart, or like 



428 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 

the telling of beads one by one, with many a sleepy 
nod between- whiles. 

For there remained also, for the old earthy crea- 
ture still within him, that great blessedness of phys- 
ical slumber. To sleep, to lose oneself in sleep- 
that, as he had recognized always, was a good thing. 
And it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke 
amid the murmuring voices of the people who had 
kept and tended him so carefully through his sick- 
ness, now kneeling around his bed : and what he 
heard confirmed, in his, then perfect, clearness of 
soul, the spontaneous suggestion of his own bodily 
feeling. He had often dreamt that he had been 
condemned to die, that the hour, wath wild thoughts 
of escape, had arrived ; and waking, with the sun 
all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been 
full of gratitude, for his place there, alive still, in 
the land of the living. He read surely, now, in the 
manner, the doings, of these people, some of w^hom 
were passing away through the doorway, where the 
sun still lay heavy and full, that his last morning 
was come, and turned to think again of the beloved. 
Of old, he had often fancied that not to die on a 
dark and rainy day would itself have a little allevi- 
ating grace or favor about it. The people around 
his bed were praying fervently — AM ! AM ! anima 
Christiana ! In the moments of his extreme help- 
lessness their mystic bread had been placed, had 
descended like a snowflake from the sky, between 
his lips. Soothing fingers had applied to hands and 
feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses 



MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 429 

through which the world had come and gone from 
him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. 
It was the same people, who, in the gray, austere 
evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried 
them secretly, with their accustomed prayers ; but 
with joy also, holding his death, according to their 
generous view in this matter, to have been of the 
nature of a martyrdom ; and martyrdom, as the 
church had a^wavs said, a kind of sacrament with 
plenary grace. 

THE BND. 



^v^ 



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